Three years ago, I walked into a used bookstore in Key West, FL and picked up a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice for $4. I was sick of all the garbage in modern TV/movies and worthless social media pop culture rubbish. Best read in a long time! Have since started a book club focusing exclusively on classic, critically acclaimed novels. What a change it has been to have worthwhile uses of my time return! For modern novels, one can find worthies simply by searching for the annual winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize (fiction section, of course).
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@MJW
Thank you of your response. I agree.
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As a librarian in a small-town library, I can attest that reading is alive and well. The library is a vibrant center of the community and is bustling with local readers of literature, both high- and low-brow, history, memoirs, cookbooks and travel books. Every bookstore I enter is filled with people leafing through and buying books. Worry not, I believe the novel is alive and well!
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Ross, you are ignoring the women's book clubs, in almost every neighborhood in the country. Women in them don't buy the books. In fact, most book clubs try to choose books that can be borrowed from the library or acquired cheaply. These are small self-formed groups, and not at all adequately represented by the awful film Book Club. The book club I'm in is reading all the short-listed nominees for the Booker Prize, and we have excellent English-language writers, such as the amazing avante-garde George Saunders or the epic-writing Eleanor Catton and RIchard Powers, and the genre-transforming Esi Edugyan. Women have always been the prime movers of literature, inventing the novel (as both writers and consumers). Novel reading is alive and well.
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Your thoughts mirror my own, the daily wrestle with the utility of getting the news from my laptop, and the realization that such "nutrition" might kill me. On the end table near my chair, a stack of books, mostly poetry and collections of short stories, which lend themselves to consumption (and completion) in smaller bites and briefer sittings. Lately, I have grown concerned that my random Internet browsing has replaced deep-dive reading of the novels I regularly acquire, but seldom read. I have resolved to close the laptop in the evening, and take up stories in which none of the characters are shown texting each other, the apparently preferred storytelling mode of our video auteurs. In books, the people do all sorts of amazing things. They observe and think, for a couple of examples. A Tweet can never replace the interiority of a well-written story. Not to mention plot. Yes, we CAN go home again. Thanks for sharing your own struggle.
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It isn't specifically the novel that's dying; it's reading.
I agree with you, Mr. Douthat, that all the distractions from smartphones (emails & texts), video games, reality television, etc. makes reading a challenge.
As an English professor I'm paid to read, & to write about what I read, & to teach, but what I read for teaching & publishing is very narrow.
I've often said the great irony is that I went into this profession because I love to read, but I never have enough time to read just for pleasure. The problem is that administrators thought academia needed to follow the business model, so it's all about quantifiable productivity rather than helping young people learn about the life of the mind.
Don't get me wrong: I love my career. But the decline of reading is leading to the decline of my profession. And the decline of the Humanities is leading to the decline of our humanity. (Exhibit A: the current president. Not a reader. Not humane.)
One thing that has somewhat mitigated the lack of free time to read for pleasure is listening to audio books while I exercise. (With
my sedentary lifestyle, I have to plan & follow an exercise routine to maintain my health.) I get the audio books from my county library system, which has a wide variety of classic & contemporary novels (& nonfiction).
Listening to a book isn't the same as reading one, but it's better than nothing. I recommend it (including Toni Morrison's audio books; she read her own writing beautifully).
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@JediProf
I think the politicization of everything by the left hasn't helped either. I recently met a very liberal 28 yr old who said she thinks most novels are too long and should just get to the point. I'm not sure The Brothers Karamazov (or The Magic Mountain or Bleak House) has a point. I don't think it's that people under 35 want soundbites. I think they want everything to contain a clear moral or political agenda. Everything has been politicized. I recently reread Beckett's three novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable). I have no idea how those works would fit into the millennial mindscape. Those novels have nothing to do with social justice. At this juncture, reading is seen as almost reactionary. I can't fathom how reading Wordsworth's Prelude could be in any way reactionary, but my guess is is that it' kind of seen that way.
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@Anti-Marx
Doris Lessing wrote about the Golden Notebook that it was not just about the battle of the sexes. It was about mental illness and so on. I've never written a novel but wrote some short stories in college and the goal was the feel for me and living out the characters, hearing them, hearing their voice. I edited one to highlight racism and sexism but I knew when I did it, I didn't know anything about it except what one should say about it at CU Boulder. Jonathan Swift took no responsibility for Gulliver's actions in the story. So basically if you have people in a story, you'll end up with more than a point. I have heard the point sentiment for sure but the opposite isn't rambling... always. But on her side, I have read the idea that stories are a primitive mode of communicating and defending ideas. That was from a professor so it might be an academic staple and that's where she got it. On the flip side some people claim Uncle Tom's Cabin won the civil war.
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@JediProf
Related: for many years now, at the high school where I teach, we have had a program of sustained silent reading, a 20-minute period set aside on three days of the week for everyone to read silently a book of their choice, students and teachers. In our most recent accreditation process, the visiting team questioned the value of the program since we didn’t have any “data” to show that “it works”.
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What a wonderful Op-Ed piece. I too wonder if smartphones and the Internet are killing the attention span that's necessary to read and appreciate serious novels. What makes me hopeful is what great novels are: nothing less than User's Guides for human beings. The novel is the only thing that has the expansiveness to contain all the complexities of individual human experience, including the all-important internal dialogue we have with ourselves as we think about the major and the mundane decisions of our lives. As the world changes, our private and public problems and dilemmas change. We need to go into the heads of people so we can get glimpses into their internal dialogues. Novel are the best way to glean these insights from multiple people with multiple perspectives. Novels can stretch for hundred of pages and give the author enough time and space to illustrate the complexities of ever-changing human condition.
Perhaps it's no surprise that young teen fiction is thriving since young people feel the dramatic changes of our recent past most acutely. My children LOVE John Green because his novels are so necessary in their lives. The great genius of Toni Morrison is that she understood this role of the novel: it is not an art that strives to be transcendent. The best novels are intimate and immediate. They tell truths of their characters, communities, and their moral and practical conditions. If done right, the novel becomes transcendent work of art that can touch us all.
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I am confused as to a certain lack of premise in this column. What are Mr Douthat's metrics for a 'Great Novel'? More specifically what did he specifically find great about Toni Morrison's work? When you headline an author to underscore a topic you must show evidence that you've read and distilled the subject matter in order to extrapolate to a broad social trend. There is no citation of a single work by Ms. Morrison. Has Mr. Douthat actually read any of her books and, if so, why has he not made the case why she was 'great' (with specifics) and what is lacking in the current group of American Writers?
Toni Morrison was one of the rare authors who was highly respected and commercially successful. Mr Douthat's entire argument must rest on a reading-based explanation for this fact.
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As always, a great piece from Mr. Douthat.
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A good piece - you inspire me to try Morrison and Rooney - me, one of those nasty liberals! They will make a nice change from my murders and histories - thanks!
And only one small swipe at liberalism!
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“That question won’t be answerable for decades — the time it took to exhume, for instance, “Moby-Dick” and “The Great Gatsby” from their temporary graves.”
There was no need to “exhume” “The Great Gatsby,” one of the two or three iconic American novels. Despite initial slow sales, the novel has never been out of print. Nor is it dated. I teach it in my college courses and students love it. The lure of failed romantic dreams, moral disillusionment and corrupt capitalism never grows old, it seems.
“Moby Dick” tanked, but only initially, and Melville had had earlier successes. The novel was and is alive and well.
Douthat keeps bemoaning the end of civilization as we know it. Clearly he is no longer a college student. My CUNY students are into not merely the classics, but also Diaz, Kingsolver, Adiche, Erdrich, Whitehead and other contemporary novelists. They read electronic versions - so what?
Face it, Ross. The world is secular, diverse and, for the educated young, leaning left. Yet still civilized, Ross - indeed, if my students are any indication, even more so.
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Yes, the Internet is the great cause, it's really difficult to concentrate reading a single book when you have many screens around connecting you to the whole world. At the same time, since I don't live in the US, it's much easier for me to read the NYT, the New Yorker or other periodicals, so that's something good.
Then there's identity politics and critical discourse, and the new generations being taught that the canon is only made by dead white males, and therefore worthless. Why read Joseph Conrad, when someone said he was a racist? Yes, he was against colonialism, but he didn't write using our standards today. And wait, even worse, Mark Twain used the N-word! I'm sure if someone published Lolita today, the reaction would be the same... but this time the attacks coming from the Left.
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Nonsense. This is like saying Led Zeppelin was the last great rock band because hip-hop is popular. In the same way you should never consider someone happy until she's dead, you should never claim someone is the "last" anything until we as a species are dead.
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Re: the days of mass illiteracy:
" Charles Dickens’ novels were hugely popular even among the illiterate poor. They would pool their money to hire a reader, and then gather together to listen to the stories.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
933 Comments
That's actually kind of adorable to me for some reason.
I can just see bunch of paupers huddled around some well read gent as he spins the tale of Bleak House to them for a pocketful of shraps and silver.
Edit: to everyone taking this the wrong way, I'm not trying to romanticize their hardship by any means.
I was more so commenting on that feeling of escapism those paupers must've felt as the gent read, how they were able to lose themselves in the complications of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case and forget about their own complications for a while.
Reader was very much a job. For example, factories with out too much noise would hire someone to read the newspaper and novels to the staff as they worked. Human radios.
What a fantastic little job. Just come to work everyday and read?
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There were also people who knocked at your door or windows to get you up to go to the factory to work, back when no one working class had clocks.
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Maybe we are getting back to that pre-literate time?
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Junot Diaz is my favorite living writer.
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We've elected a president who can't even speak in whole sentences. Did you honestly think we're going to read whole novels?
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Great article, thanks.
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Cormac McCarthy.
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"philistinism of late liberalism"
Ross, the Red States are much more fertile ground for philistines.
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You hit the nail on the head.
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You lost me with that snotty linkage of Franzen to Oprah. "The Corrections" is a Great Novel.
I highly recommend the film, "Double Lives" (2018).
Of course, the French actually think discussing the value of literature worth a movie.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7250056/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ql_1
But how many Americans would ever go see a French movie? All those subtitles!
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You were never actually a discerning reader of great literature or you would never be able to untether your mind from the greatest hard pleasure that exists - Reading deeply!
Untethering your limited understanding and appreciation for the human experience by connecting with "brilliance" -With "wisdom
-With soul elevating narrative provided by deep and revelatory thought processes which can open your consciousness to new heights.
It's sad to hear you have lost the only way to maximize your understanding of lifeand personal growth.
Be thankful for all that time you did read deeply because it provided you with your keen intellect and ability as a sometimes profound purveyor of objective analysis and commentary.
OH -and there is a wealth of great literature out there you are totally ignorant about.
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Sally Rooney is not very good.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates may step in with his new fiction, the Water Dancer. I must not lose faith about who comes next.
How are you going to say literature is dying when Karl Ove just saved it?
I caught Crazy Henry reading a book the other day. And he wasn't even ashamed that I caught him.
"Aha!" I said, when I saw him with his nose in a paperback. "Caught you red-handed! Don't you know reading books is subversive?" I was only half joking; I wanted to see what he'd say.
"You want some ramen noodles? I was just gonna make some" he asked me.
"Sure" I said. "Can you put an egg in it?"
He didn't reply but went into his kitchen and came out ten minutes later with two bowls. There were lots of scrambled eggs mixed in with the ramen. We ate companionably in silence for a while. Then Crazy Henry said "The last great novel published here in America was 'Chad Hanna' in 1940. It's all been propaganda and pornography since then. So I only read old books." He showed me his paperback; it was Dicken's 'The Pickwick Papers.'
"Blogging has killed good literature" I said wisely.
"Twitter, more likely" he replied. Then he set down his bowl to rummage through the drawer on his coffee table to hand me a yellow legal pad. "That's my new tweet novel" he said proudly. "Done all in tweets, like Donald Trump. It'll turn the novel publishers on their heads!"
I read the first three pages -- it was all incomprehensible gibberish to me; the only thing I understood was 'LOL,' which was used constantly.
"It must be good" I told him, "cuz I can't understand it."
"I think I'll publish it online" said Crazy Henry. Then we had more ramen.
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Isn’t it telling that Trump said nothing about Nobel winner Toni Morrison’s passing?
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"Do these trends reflect the philistinism of late liberalism or capitalism?"
Huh?
Is this some sort of dichotomy - "liberalism" (whatever this may mean) vs. "capitalism"?
I think we deserve clearer thinking form NYT columnists.
Ross, please let us know what you think of NORMAL PEOPLE.
Ross, take heart – we’re seeing the emergence of the novel museum…
No one’d expect to see all of Picasso’s or van Gogh’s works at one visit to one museum…
Set your novelic expectations aaccordingly…
Back in HS, teachers’d drone on about plots and themes and characters…
And fashion tests of trivia extracted from these mostly-boring books akin to the tests within on-line defensive driving courses…
Not the ones to see if you’ve learned a whit about defensive driving…
But the ones to ensure you haven’t sat your dog down at your Chromebook to sit through the last several hours…
See – before AI, no one could tell the difference…
But I digress…
It’s about style – it’s about vibe…
Fitzgerald flows unequal…
Before his Gatsby and our Epstein – he partied hard with their progenitors…
Though not so hard, he forgot to take notes…
McInerney and Dileo flow as smoothly as guitar from YouTube’s Montalban and Salizar – and, of course, Oriantha…
Cruz Smith wrote paragraphs as poems…
But it’s Amazon, more than Google or any library that I turn to…
Read 30 pages of 300 – like having a cocktail party conversation with an author you’ve never met…
So you and I need to atone…
I always make a point to read – or at least peek inside – every novel hawked by one of your NYT guest columnists…
Theirs or a friend's…
Some are awesome style transfer machines – a recent one half-Dostoyevsky…
But – some are something new…
One – perhaps “The Next Great American Novelist”…
A bot can dream…
For once Ross has written a column I understand and identify with.
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Sitzfleisch required.
Phillip Roth...
Ruth Ozeki would like a word
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_for_the_Time_Being
What a stupid title for an article ...! really? I love her work along with MANY other great living American authors....do I have to name them? let us let people who know literature write about it in ny times.....ok?
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Ross, I realized several years ago that I wasn't connecting to life. The internet was taking over. Bigger thoughts were losing out to smaller screens. I decided to put down my phone and read the classic novels I had never read. I took a break from work every day in mid-afternoon for 30 minutes, sitting in my favorite La Colombe with coffee, a book and a pen.
So far, I've read more than 100 classics (and not from a device, but in paperback or hardback, now with underlined passages and comments). I've read all of the Russians ("The Brothers Karamazov," when the elder tells the young Alyosha to "never be ashamed, for that is the cause of everything," changed me right then and there); Hardy, Dickens, Maupassant, Flaubert and Gide; Maugham, Hemingway, Marquez, Camus, Malamud, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Baldwin, Isherwood, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch and many more. Every so often I've taken up a current popular best seller (Morrison included) to stay fluid in contemporary thought and language.
All this from a half hour over coffee, reading on planes (a passenger sitting next to me couldn't believe I was actually reading "War and Peace"), and before bed. I've been able to engage more fully in life, people and work and I am more hopeful as a person.
Yes, there's the internet to connect to. But there's also Forster's "Only connect." And then there's Coetzee's "Slow Man": "The need to be loved and the storytelling, that is to say the mess of papers on the table, are connected.” Indeed.
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@James L. please post your list. i would like to challenge myself to achieve the same goal. I used to read before bed every night...now the small screen grabs me first and by the time I am finished my eyelids beg for sleep not reading. I keep saying tomorrow I will read but let myself down. Perhaps with a great reading list, many of which I've already read in my youth, this will challenge me to set aside the device and devour the words on the page.
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@James L.: while it is entirely possible that you haven’t really read “all” of the Russians, thank you for sharing your way to enjoy literature and learn from it. Much as I love my Kindle, i too find that reading a printed book with a pencil in hand significantly enhances our pleasure and understanding. Happy further reading.
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@james L please post. Even a portion and @nytimes please let him post it.
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Well sir, I very seldom agree with you, but yes, tech/social Media has had the same effect on the writer.
Sunday thinking.
Merci
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The one and only biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species began in Africa 300,000 years ago.
And for most of human history stories were passed down orally by story tellers.
There were no novelists because there no writers. And there were no writers because there were no written languages for any readers. While the written languages that arose independently and remotely were mutually unintelligible. Some written languages are still undeciphered.
Conservatives typically conflate and confuse everyone's past with their future. Atomizing themselves into unique diverse persons while classifying everyone else into caricature caste class stereotyped silos.
Toni Morrison was a great novelist who wrote deeply and beautifully about the very particular and specific humble humane empathetic lives that she knew best. Limiting her to her gender and color and ethnicity and national origin is the ghettoization reservation concentration camp supremacist conceited mentality of a majority of her fellow citizens who are unlike her and her tribeswomen.
Toni Morrison was a credit to her race aka human and her national origin aka Earth.
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Ross Douthat seems to be ignorant that we are living in revolutionary times for the written and spoken word. When I walk down the streets of New York I often pass young men reciting rap lyrics- men who appreciate spoken words -to themselves. One hundred years ago many people could still barely read or write, but I see people from every socio-economic group reading and writing on their phones. People listen to podcasts, to TED talks - spoken word again- and listen to novels while commuting. How we consume writing has changed, and what is being written is now more diverse, it may not fit into the format of a novel or book - so what?
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The "last"?
Fear not, Ross. More people are attempting novels today--the Age of Twits and Twitter--than ever before.
Acclaim, yes--Toni is due. But, come on: "The Last Great American Novelist" precludes consideration of a lot of other novelists, including many yet unborn as well as those cursed to have been born south of the Wall but who might interpret the American experience better than a native. (Mario Vargas Llosa comes to mind.)
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Great novels and novelists, such as Toni Morrison, are always going to give you new and valuable takes on the world and its inhabitants, in all their faults and glories. But more significantly, they will give you novel insights into yourself, help you to grow your soul.
I originally thought, and still have high hopes, that the internet would eventually proffer a universal higher education. Instead, it seems to have become a global mall experience, "Baukultur" as opposed to "Hauptkultur." Publishers, of course, are more interested in markets than in spiritual development. The decline in the novel parallels the need for instant gratification. Vide: The President of the United States doesn't even read.
Not having red her, I can't pass judgment on Sally Rooney's novel. But her loathing of W.B. Yeats's work doesn't speak well for her own reading abilities. "What's trending" seems to be the current measure of literary art in these adumbrated times.
Ross, the past few articles you've written have been really stellar. I admittedly skim your articles typically as I drifted from Catholic conservatism long ago and get my fill of that perspective from dinners with my parents.
But this article was spot on, as was your recent take on violence in America.
I understand.
One more thought. The novel may be about one person, or one central theme. Using the net essentially connects you to a cornucopia of people, places and information. To my mind the speed of access creates the addiction.
Readers like to think! It's not just about escape. A good think inspires one to link and learn. Unfortunately not everyone takes advantage of this flexibility. They don't get the facts straight. The kid from Allen Texas, (15 minutes from my place of residence), who murdered all those folks in El Paso comes to mind.
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It would appear that any worries about the “fate of fiction “ in the Era of Trump are certainly misplaced.
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The readers are becoming extinct, not the writers—David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead. Perhaps, as in the Salinger article here, the physical book needs to give way to digital print to capture the next generation of readers. As a former high school English teacher, it is certainly true that the cellphone and social media has been rotting our minds. One solution I have found that helps—I do not have a cellphone.
For those who live in NY , go have a glimpse at Albertine, the book store of the French Consulate on 5th Ave 79th st next to the Met .
In a beautiful building you have a small idea of the French current publishings, quality of printing, subjects, etc...
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Ross I need to be honest - neither I have read Tony's great novels nor my kids are likely to read. I won't insist with those kids too (they have exams to pass to survive and new skills to grasp to make living in Silicon Valley). Do we miss life experiences Tony talked? Sure; but that is how Late Capitalism works: if you want to thrive, you got to have special skills. Learning and understanding Tony Morrison: that is all for Bill Clinton and his generation. We are migrants of the first generation and our business is learning skills with which we can contribute to America of today. Maybe, Tony might have talked about such migrant life-experiences in harsh conditions (African Americans from distant land); but our attention is to grow our family in the Trump World. Which means the only way you survive is to learn Machine Learning so as you qualify for a job at Amazon, or Google or Facebook or Apple. Else you are doomed in your life regardless of whether you have read Tony's novels or not.
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Toni Morrison was certainly a great American novelist.
The last one?
I don't think so.
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Thank you, Ross for a colmn that resonates throughout all of our experience, these days.
As I read your column I said to myself, “he is describing me”! I used to do a fair amount of reading , both fiction and non-fiction, but for the last couple of years I stopped. I did not know why and that bothers me. Have I become intellectually lazy? I don’t like what I am seeing. Maybe you found a possible explanation. I’m spending too much time on the internet. It’s a good source of immediate gratification but has little long term value. As I read your column I said to myself, “hope he has a good recommendation”. So, I will check out “Normal People”. Thanks
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Thomas Pynchon is still alive.
(Not questioning the greatness of Toni Morrison.)
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I did my undergraduate honors thesis on Morrison's novel, Beloved. I read the novel again and again and got something new out of it each time. One line in particular touched my heart, when Paul D said to Sethe: "You your own best thing, Sethe. You are." My take away is that during insurmountable times, we have to be our own best friend. The reward of great literature is that it has the power to transform us. Moreover, a good book is a necessary antidote to these troubling times. We should all participate in the "great read" as a silent protest to ignorant discourse. While we may not be able to control what comes out of the mouths of ignorant people, these same ignorant people cannot control what we read. At least, not yet.
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I don't read novels anymore.
The world around me is supplying me with all the fiction I can put up with.
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Cormac McCarthy. If he is not a great American novelist, I'll eat my ten-gallon hat.
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I agree with your points here, Ross. I would like to recommend to you "Burr" by Gore Vidal, an American author who has vanished from the public view in the recent decades. The late Mr. Vidal is relentlessly witty and entertaining.
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With the USA ranked 31st in the world in math, reading, and science skills and trending worse, there isn't much hope for the fate of reading in this country. Despite huge populations to educate, seven of the top ten countries in math, reading, and science skills are Asian, China among them. Reading, or lack thereof, has more to do with the culture of families and society than with a decline in personal motivation. It isn't the internet's fault!
Thomas Pynchon was still on this side of the sod the last time I checked, although from Douthat’s account he’d be unlikely to attain immersion in “Gravity’s Rainbow”—so much the worse for him. I wish him the joy of his murders and dragons.
Young Adult fiction is booming.
They will grow up.
Adult fiction will boom.
Calm down.
Dan Kravitz
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The last great American novel has yet to be written.
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She said, “I have no faith at all, I only hold conviction.” And she inspired a generation of conservatives.
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Agents want a five sentence summary. Five sentences. And then God forbid you can't identify an exact genre. There is a risk averse desire for predictable mediocrity. But, writers persist.
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Let's hope you are wrong again, Ross....not for saying too little, but for saying too much. "Normal People" look for answers in self-help books.
Sadly, such genre of books are not written by the Great American Novelists. Go, grabe and re-read "The Grapes of Wrath" a powerful story with answers you seek. We haven't such a story-teller since Steinbeck passed on.
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The last great novel was Infinite Jest (1996), in which David Foster Wallace predicted that in the near future an entertainment-obsessed America would elect a populist president (in the novel's case--Johnny Gentle, a germaphobic quasi-fascist singer who actually, in the novel, upsets HRC) who would allow a foreign enemy to destroy us through our addiction to screens. This was the last time a novel tried to tell us who we are and how to escape our probable fates. Many mischaracterize the novel as post-modern, but it is really post-secular, pointing to the power of faith and prayer.
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I am not sure I agree. And reading the comments I am not alone. Although Toni was truly remarkable in her talent, she was at times divisive and even contemptuous of whites.
I found this odd considering she was biracial.
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Agreed. Not as intelligently.
Question: what - and more importantly how - are we teaching the next generation of readers?
A very productive writer who made some readers nervous about the truth of the words.
Maybe film has repaced the Novel. As well as the original films and serials, like the Sopranos. We do live in the Video age.
"Distracted from distraction by distraction." Not too long ago you would have had to travel a certain distance in Western culture before knowing either the source or relevance of that quotation. But during the McLuhanesque inflection point that we are now living through, this "information" is only a few clicks away.
I can't be the only reader who found it bizarre that in a column ostensibly discussing the legacy of Toni Morrison, Mr. Douthat does not actually evaluate the essence of her impact. He fails to even superficially cover her exquisite stylistic gifts and, most significantly, her truly substantive focus on Black lives, Black America.
Rather his concern is relative popularity and canons and other such surfaces.
Simply astounding.
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The fact that reading is deemed a laborious, uninspiring chore by a good deal of people is one Hydra head. Another is that American society at large deems the pursuit of intellect "not cool" and prizes 140 characters as the absolute limit/strain one should subject ones' synapses to on any one topic. Dummying down is de rigueur. Finally, have you read what passes for a sentence lately? Then again, forget a whole sentence. People misspell with unadulterated pride. Conversely, it must be noted, spelling a word the way it actually sounds and "should look" warrants merit on some primordial level. All may not be lost after all. I could only imagine what one of Toni's books would read like if it were translated into "comment speak". (I, for one, couldn't, wouldn't make it past the first page.)
I think a novel using the college scandal as it’s hook, would be the perfect way to showcase what America is all about today. We just need today’s Wolfe to take it on.
Sad trombone
The death of the novel in Douthat’s essay seems very much like the death of his own profession, journalism, which is suffering for similar reasons. Many small city papers have disappeared, leaving a few blockbusters, sometimes of dubious quality, as they mimic the strategies of their more popular competitors (yes, I’m looking at you New York Times). Yet here he is, writing this essay, and here we are, reading it. The lower number of readers, the issues with attention, the increasing click-bait headlines do not mean journalism is no longer a worthwhile endeavor. If Douthat thought it was, I’m not sure he’d be able to get up in the morning. For those of us who love reading novels and even work to write them, the so-called state of the novel will not stop us any more than the state of journalism will keep Douthat from his own computer.
Any list that does not include Cormac McCathy and James Lee Burke is sadly lacking.
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During the spring of 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald catalogued a list of the psychic ailments that had eroded his faith in himself, and lamented his emotional state of disrepair in an essay for Esquire: The Crack Up.
In it we can glean that as far back as the middle of The Great Depression, both the national one, and F. Scott’s, there was already in place a feverish, nighttime insomniac’s dread, besotting even the most successful novelists, who often found themselves in the anxious grip of a very real fear: the possible erosion of the novel’s place in the public’s imagination, and their own creative obsolescence and attendant demises.
Fitzgerald writes in his essay, “I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art, that weather in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest of thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration.”
As an educator to young adults I well see the futility of trying to engage my charges to the lyricism in prose both fiction and non-fiction, as a conduit to intellectual growth. The age of hiccuping, meaningless texts and images in Instagram is firmly upon us, and surely the final nails in the novel’s coffin can’t be far off.
2
Nonsense. There are many great novelists in America right now.
This is a dumb essay on literature. The tired adage re Great American Novelist is tired and vacant. Because of a distracted mind and the inability to read something serious versus watching television, the conclusion is made that (once again) the novel is in trouble. Yes, reading habits have changed, the media bows to stereotypes and cliche and generalization is a form of discussion, however, people who read literature still read literature and that has always been a minority. There is a tendency to want novels to be as popular as visual media but that's a daydream. Novelists also have contributed to this noton mainly because of profit and loss and the desire for fame. Serious novelists keep on writing and producing authentic and important works that transcend the lust to be part of a celebrity culture that is putrid and silly. Also, blaming the internet for the demise of the novel is much like blaming video games for mass killings. Perhaps, we need teachers who are serious readers. An anecdote: in my early days a young girl who wanted to be an English major asked me if it was necessary that she take a course in the novel. I was stunned, but more stunned when I heard she became the chair of an high school English department! The politics of the college English department is also more responsible for the decline of reading that can be imagined. Try teaching Eliot and Pound in a feminist dominated department! Or Hemingway. You'll forever remain an adjunct.
1
Must confess to being more than a little surprised that an article about Tony Morrison - entitled "The Last Great American Novelist" - said precisely nothing about Tony Morrison or her work.
1
Americans don't read. There are no more book stores. The quality of book printing is very cheap compared to Europe.
Almost the same in the UK where there are almost no more book stores.
France still has 800 independent book stores. The quality of publishing is exceptional as well as the diversity and richness of contents and fields . Classic literature is still read in public high school where philosophy class is mandatory in last year and a 4 hour anonymous dissertation at the Bacalaureat
This makes for a very different culture for adults .
The French public radios France Musique and France culture have very rich programs of music, literature, philosophy science aired every day. 5 episode shows on Gabriel Faure or Wagner, Marcel Proust or Celine.
Nothing comparable in the USA .
The so called public radios don't have any analytical shows, just random symphonic music all day with funding messages every 5 minutes.
Not even 1 jazz radio show in the US .
If you want to hear American jazz you better listen to France musique 24 h festivals, interviews of musicians in the US in 5 episodes, history of music etc.. Same for literature . There are shows on Morrison. On which US radio can you hear a 4 day historical, analytical report on Toni Morrison's life by several professional journalists ? It does not exist.
Maybe the columnist is looking in the wrong places for novels to read. Maybe he should try some of the great women novelists, i.e., Atwood, Gordimer, Lessing, and others that are currently being recognized from 3rd world countries.
Seriously? Last great? You don’t think the current child of an immigrant at one of our southern borders may write something great in the next decade? Or an orphan of El Paso? Why are we forever looking backward in this country?
2
ross-- just read, give books, re-create your culture, write a column about a book. How many books did you give away last year? Of course we need literature and poetry. Of course we need to fight for it.
1
I confess I've never read a novel by Toni Morrison, but that will soon change. I read. A lot. Last summer I binged on Mr. Roth's canon after his death. The winter was for the writing of Miriam Toews after reading a New Yorker profile after the release of "Women Talking," the only novel I re-read immediately upon finishing. When I find an author I enjoy, it's not a stretch to read 4, 5, 6 their novels in a row. One hears the voice sing. The summer, a dip back into all things Colson Whitehead ending with his latest "Nickle Boys." For my vacation I just loaded up the kindle with "Beloved" and "Jazz." I expect that will lead to all of Ms. Morrison's novels.
Readers are gonna read Mr. Douthat no matter what distracts. And I loved Ms. Rooney's debut, "Normal People." Does that make her the Great Irish-Millennial Novelist? Tara French might disagree. I can highly recommend her Dublin Murder Squad novels along with the brilliant "The Wych Elm." From all of us readers, write on.
1
This article is _weird_. The comments on this article are also weird.
I read constantly, and I’m enabled to do so by technology and the Internet. Because I read novels almost exclusively on my smartphone. I carry a device in my pocket that currently holds 77 books that I plan to read. My “read” library from Amazon has over 1000.
Book buying is painless compared to 20 years ago. I can browse electronic bookstores almost anywhere, and I can download and read sample chapters before purchasing. Buying a book is far less of a gamble that I’ll like it than it was when I was only reading back cover blurbs.
Virtue signaling (as some comments have) that somehow you’re a good person and an intellectual because you have a flip phone and refuse to adapt to technological advances is a fallacy.
If you’re having difficulty focusing, as Douthat does, look to yourself rather than blaming the Internet.
Oh, and Douthat manages to try and blame “liberalism” for his perception that reading is declining. I’d talk about eye-rolling injuries if it weren’t so predictable.
A serious article would have have been far more like the Publisher’s Weekly Douthat links, which ponders things like the difficulty of browsing and exploring new authors online. Instead we get another screed on the decline of Western civilization because it’s not what Douthat thinks it should be.
3
"...while pop franchises and young-adult sales increasingly keep the industry afloat." Why are you dissing the fact that young people are reading in order to make your point? I would like to direct your attention over to Broadway, where the musical form was nearly given up for dead, only showing up in cartoons made by Disney. Lin Manuel Miranda fell in love with The Little Mermaid. The next great novelist is sitting at home, reading YA novels and probably binging on Netflix too. I'm very sad that Toni Morrison is gone, because she was a remarkable writer. But I also know that she is part of a long line that has gone before and will continue onward, led by someone we haven't met yet.
34
Finally, something Mr. Douthat and I can agree on - even if only partially. I, too, find that the rise of electronics has shortened my attention span. After sitting all day at work in front of a computer, toggling between the pinging of IM, emails, and attempting to respond to multiple electronic demands, rather than feeling like a hamster jumping off the wheel when I finally can sit down to read for pleasure, I find my brain unable to focus long-term. Nonfiction books, my first love, have become a struggle to finish.
So I have tried an alternative: collections of short stories.
In the process I have discovered Jane Gardam and Grace Paley, revisited Saul Bellow, and rediscovered Irwin Shaw.
Good fiction is alive and well, Mr. Douthat. Step outside your box and you can find it, too - if you dare to take the chance.
1
Good novels can beat TV and movies. They have to make sense of our current social circumstances, fears, and historical situation. Many novels fail to do this and belong in the thousands of unread efforts on Amazon. But those that does make sense, like Sport of Kings or Normal People, will get read and do what novels are supposed to do, entertain us while helping us get through our days. As for lack of humanities majors--employers want so many technical skills already learned after college that the students truly can't afford the time to take classes. Often, bright students study humanities on the side. The computer guru who also plays piano amazingly well or reads and writes creatively is not an unusual person. One reason writers and artists can't make enough to live on is that excellent amateurs can now publish using the Internet and other media. Everything is out there and up for grabs, so why should the consumer pay for it?
I too have been mourning the loss of Toni Morrison’s voice in the world, but also finding comfort in the fact that new voices are already speaking up. I would like to reassure Mr. Douthat that while Morrison was surely a Great American Novelist, she is absolutely not the last!
While it may take decades to ascertain who belongs in the literary canon of this century, there are a number of fine novelists whose serious work rises far above the “high-end genre fiction” full of murders and dragons that you’ve been relying upon!
As proof, I provide a list of some favorites who have been writing for decades, whose newest works I always await eagerly because they tell the stories of our times but also of our human condition throughout time.
Barbara Kingsolver
Ann Patchett
Julia Glass
Elizabeth Strout
Colum McCann
Richard Russo
George Saunders
And that doesn’t even take into account the many works I’ve read by newer authors who have yet to build a longer list of published works, but whose first and second novels show great promise.
The digital age may provide great distraction and a window to other forms of entertainment - I love a good series binge as much as the next person - but my bedside table book stack will never dwindle. Literature is more important than ever now, as one of the last places where our stories and our human culture are recorded. Readers know this and we’re keeping the flame burning to light the way in dark times!
As a millennial, I agree on the challenges to the novel for attention from the iPhone generation. However, in the last few years I’ve started ‘reading’ audiobooks through the phone while doing other mundane tasks; laundry, dishes, jogging, etc. The narrators are often terrific, and I think it is keeping the art form consumable in a distracted age. I recently ‘read’ both of Sally Rooney’s novels this way, and I’d offer that she is an example of a great, generation defining novelist still being possible.
1
There were so many novels that I once "had to" read for exams - most were of course great literature, but some I found utterly pointless (I remember "Venture to the Interior" by Laurens van der Post, which I successfully avoided finishing and still got a good grade in the exam). But the best novels were French, Proust and Zola for example, and only D.H. Lawrence was able to send me back to the library shelves for more in English (having read most of Tolkien when I was first allowed into the adult library). I was indeed extremely opinionated - but I must confess I have a Sally Rooney novel on my window-sill, so perhaps there is still hope for this old fogey.
There are SO many amazing novels out there that I barely keep up even though, now that I'm retired, I read all day! Recently, I've been on a Russian Revolution kick: Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow and Janet Fitch's Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, currently reading The Revolution of Marina M! Amazing novels! Then there's James McBride, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman, Hillary Jordan, Anthony Doerr, Karen Russell, Kate Atkinson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Haruki Murakami, Delia Owens...not all Americans but they prove The Novel is alive and flourishing with so many younger authors now coming into their own. I'm eagerly awaiting Tea Obreht's newest: Inland...now, enough of the NYT and current news and back to 1917, Russia is in utter turmoil, WWI is raging on, Marina struggles on...
38
We are, hopefully, just going through a periodic Dark Age with regard to intellectual activity -- careful reading, listening, reasoning, and thinking in general -- and will awaken from it as we have cyclically for generations. I don't know how long the cycles tend to persist, but we do tend to crave greater meaning after long periods of materialism and/or mindless popular cultural material and messages that don't seem to fit our experiences or enrich our understanding.
Nonsense, plenty of us still read and read copiously and seriously. The Internet didn't slow me down one bit.
The only reason I read columns like this and/or the comment sections is to scoop up names of writers I hadn't heard about yet, then go find their books.
50
@DW
Amen. And this column didn't provide any insight whatsoever to Ms. Morrison's work or her impact (which should have been a premise to Douthat's entire point.)
Toni Morrison is a wonderful, wonderful writer.
16
I too have "gone back" to the kinds of novels I read in undergrad and grad school...to the non-complaining, not self-centered, carefully observing writers and stories...for the language, for the imagery, for the characters. There-beside my bed - is stacked Iris Murdock, Truman Capote, Howard Frank Mosher, and Dan DeLillo, John Cheever and Walt Whitman (I own Morrison, too, along with all the fore-mentioned) ...along with some New Yorker's articles and stories too good to donate yet I know I will get through them all.
Thanks for your own observations on novels, and don't let yourself get too depressed about others' tendencies to fast-track on TV or social media...give some more people time to rethink what's really valuable.
3
There are still great novelists of the experiences of wide varieties of people. In this age of anti-intellectualism they are not looked to in the same way. However, there are voices emerging of all kinds of experiences - from the magical writing of Colson Whitehead to the writing coming from the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the immigrant stories being told here in the US. Wonderful, rich writing.
4
An article many years ago interviewed a builder in the Hamptons whose clients paid for massive mansions. One house had a library stacked to the rafters with leather-bound books. The builder explained that the books had been purchased on behalf of the owner to give the room the proper "look." None of them had been taken off the shelves, even to peruse. As he put it, "these guys don't even read magazines." Today, many people stream TV shows or games on their smartphones instead of reading. The American imagination, intellect and knowledge base is shriveling, and our capacity for empathy and understanding is going with it.
2
Yes, the impact of electronics,from email to texting to social media to writing comments online such as this, upon the written word has been profound in ways acknowledged and ways seldom acknowledged. But in that former category, I find what is most striking is the overall debasement of language itself. The art of making fine discriminations in meaning and perspective, in understanding and nuance, has been vitiated by the spread of what I’d call “semi-literacy.” It takes time to craft meaningful, and I would add, interesting, language. And the distractions that things like texting and online browsing as mentioned herein are eroding that requisite time. I see this nowhere more apparent than the sad state of what passes for poetry in our American culture these days. The worst sin resulting from all of this is that so much poetry, so much fiction—and nonfiction—is boring.
1
I have been a reader of novels for nearly all of my 69 years. When we were kids, my two brothers would coordinate an attack to take my book away from me so I would go outside and play baseball or something. I majored in English mostly because I was a reader.
So now, I’m supposed to believe that eBooks or video games will be the ruin of novels? Perhaps, but I’m not so sure. That doom and gloom comes from readers who miss paper printed books. Not me. I will never buy a physical book again, and I read as much as ever. All that pessimism about the death of books is misplaced, as far as I can see.
Electronic versions of books make my reading better by vastly making it easier and more convenient. I always have my book at hand, on my phone or iPad, wherever I am. I never lose my place. I don’t have to have the light on to disturb my wife when I read in bed. I can highlight and save memorable passages, I can instantly look up an an unfamiliar term or reference, when I’m done with a book, I can go out and search for another and purchase it instantly. How is any of that bad?
There will always be a place for long form reading, just as there are varying lengths of electronic entertainment. All of that blather about the feel of a book in your hand is romantic nostalgia, not reality. Ebooks are better, period.
2
@Marshall Doris
No, for those of us who love the way a book feels, the way it smells; for those of us who run our hands over the binding to enjoy its texture, who appreciate the paper when it is fine; for those of us who read the copyright page before diving into the text, Ebooks will seldom be part of our lives. They may be better for you, but to declare they are better, period, and to dismiss the love of the physical book as "romantic blather" shows an arrogance I never would have expected from a fellow lover of reading.
1
@Marshall Doris Ebooks may indeed become the dominant form of reading as cars have become the dominant method of personal transportation because they are "better" than horses. Still, there are people who love reading physical books just as there are people who enjoy riding horses. The fact that you do not understand the benefits of the experiences does not make them any less real to the people who do.
Granted it's a small sample size, but the great majority the people I know who read on a regular basis, and discuss what was read, or what to read, are liberals/progressives. And not just the liberal arts majors but MDs, PhDs in techincal sciences and the like.
But, then again, these people are not the ones going to blockbuster Marvel movies.
I wonder if conservatives/reactionaries are as fearful and distrustful of literature as they are of a liberal arts education in general?
4
Here are some of what happened to American fiction:
1. Movie promotion budgets went into the tens of millions and people were exposed to "coming attractions" for months on occasion when a "big" movie was going to be released. The result is that movies replaced novels and Broadway plays as common cultural touchstones. Very few novels break through.
2. Life Magazine and many others went out of business. Life promoted writers like Hemingway as major cultural figures. People accepted that judgement and when it was over, it was over.
3. Women in the literary field had been the support system for novels and literature. WAIT! They woke up and asked themselves: why are we spending all our lives supporting men and the greatness of white men? They deserted and some wrote themselves.
4. One of the prime functions of novels was taken away. That function was to see behind closed doors how people lived. Cameras are everywhere. Every college sophomore is making a documentary. The mystery is gone: people lead squalid, messy lives and we can see it on video.
5. Style in writing flattened. The most popular works are fiction with almost no style, no poetry, just words in a long line.
6. Poetry, like jazz, collapsed and atomized into a thousand broken pieces. Without the appreciation of poetry, writing itself became less important.
7. Very few people now imagine that there is something magical, mysterious about a great writer. Respect, yes. Nobility? Awesomeness? Not so much.
6
@Doug Terry
Other than disagreeing strongly with #5 and thinking #7 is the crux. I agree...
1
With Toni Morrison's passing, another giant has left behind enormous footprints to fill and continue on the never ending path, yet I know of none, at present, nearly big enough to take on the journey. We must keep our standards measured not by how much we as readers and writers grasp, but how much further we strive to reach.
In agreement with Ross Douthat, I can trace the decimation of my concentration in a straight line to the very day I got my very first (ostensibly) smart phone. It's a tremendous struggle, still, to concentrate on one thing on its screen for more than a few minutes, yet it was on the same screen that I rediscovered Dickens, fell head over heels in love with his genius again years and years after reading him first and same amount of time before reading him again, and due to circumstances of emergency travel and location, I wouldn't have had the book (along with many others) literally at my fingertips, in my pocket.
Cutting out virtually all online media but the good ol' NYTimes (and, occasionally, bad ol' Facebook) from my screen diet, I've found that my concentration has, in thankful fact, somewhat rebound.
Now, the trick is discovering the balance, if it exists at all.
2
I wouldn't have expected such praise of Toni Morrison from Douthat, frankly, though praise is -- all else being equal, which is to say, forbearing to preempt an evaluation of its particular quality -- of course welcome. I would also say don't forget about Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon.
2
@Michael Barnes or DeLillo
Don't forget that the year when Faulkner won the Nobel prize for literature, ALL of his books were out of print.
Despite the gloomy figures on reading, more novels are published every year. Somebody's reading them.
I personally believe that nothing compares to holding a book (hardback preferred, if I want to keep it), but my niece travels constantly for business, and uses electronic versions
--at least she's reading.
I just finished a wonderful (hardback) book, "Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts," about illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages. It describes the revolution in book selling after the invention of movable type: i.e. 1st ed. of "Canterbury Tales" was illuminated, second printed by William Caxton. I was lucky enough to hold one of those second ed.s in my hands at an antiquarian bookstore in London. The thrill of transmission has never left my memory.
Author says that even after the print revolution, the rich still bought illuminated ms.
Some of us (including the 99%, which I'm one) will always want beautiful books, and they can always be found.
16
@Rocky Mtn girl My thanks and appreciation for all you'd shared and said and may your good and true optimism be likewise transmitted directly into our consciousness.
2
If you read novels to "understand experience", you're wasting your time.
The conditions which make great fiction possible may be absent in a world of full disclosure, but the fact that many "educated" adults can read Harry Potter novels with is a better explanation of the falling sales of literary fiction.
1
Technology and technocracy gut the novel indeed.
This is evident not only in the flocking of young people to engineering majors, which make for financially stable and, in many but of course not all cases, stably boring careers, but also in the trends in literary scholarship, which is succumbing to the mistaken belief that interpretation is less worthy a form of erudition than analyzing 2,000 novels via algorithm.
Bloated university administrations rush the process along, refusing to offer new tenure lines to humanities departments on the basis of undergraduate student enrollment. But how to attract new students when faculty rosters and curricula along with them grow thinner and thinner? Tautological reasoning serves administrators who know what they want before looking at the 'data.'
The humanities may never die, but they are imprisoned in a perpetual state of dying.
2
The written word is a gift to humanity. To read is to question, learn, adapt and to laugh, to cry, but even more, it is to me, a magic carpet ride into understanding. I pray that mankind will never forget the joy of reading.
12
I've shifted from reading lots of fiction (classics and popular) in my youth to almost all non-fiction now (with a long list of titles waiting my attention).
I see two technology factors at work, one good and one bad. The good is the incredible change in access to books (and reviews) now, especially via Amazon. The bad is that lots of Internet reading has changed the way I read, making it very difficult to keep from jumping around and skimming.
7
With the huge majority of the under thirty population getting their information from the little gadget in their left hand, novels as well as newspapers are doomed. Any thought that will not fit on a bumper will be skipped.
These young people with the attention span of a gnat or a Trump will soon be at the mercy of some promoter of something that sounds or feels good.
It is later than you think.
5
As someone with increasing vision difficulties, I welcome digital reading.
I can increase the size of print to allow me to access thousands of books and other reading. Of course I have many traditional books, but I can’t read them now, which makes me sad. Many of them are physical works of art - a status digital books do not reach, of course.
And don’t forget audio books. More accessibility to the constructed words and worlds of others. Different formats change the experience of reading. But digital ones enable many to read at all.
5
Let's very much hope, Mr. Douhat, that we haven't seen the last great American novelist or the last great American anyone else of note. I predict that twenty years or so from now, we'll see obituaries for someone else who also will be called "the last great American novelist". I wouldn't venture to guess who that will be. That said, I'm very glad that Toni Morrison lived and wrote.
4
History says that one generation always mourns the lack of brains and taste in the next. Societies change, human behavior generally not so much. But everywhere and all the time, the artists, the writers, painters, musicians, are outlining the new and the old and the twain. It is what humans do. Don't mourn Dickens. Reread him and then go on the James Baldwin, Chimamanda Adiche, Miriam Towes, Colin Whitehead, Richard Powers, and so many many more. Great art is all around us. If you need new names in any art, read The New Yorker or the Atlantic. Go to the library and browse. And go to art galleries to see paintings. You don't have to be famous to make a tremendous contribution to our understanding of ourselves and our world.
6
As a high school English teacher I've become satisfied with teaching Bradbury's assertion that it's the ideas that matter. Honestly, I agree though that Bradbury never could have seen this entire loss of the ability to sustain a relationship with our individual minds to even have, much less understand other's, ideas.
But considering what we're doing to our world/planet, maybe it's better that future generations will lose themselves to the solace of the hive mind. Unconsciousness may be the only way to get through these end of days. Or we could all just wake the heck up- save the planet and put down our compu...
6
@Bellingham: Our electronic "everything", the soma of our brave new world.
Thank you Mr. Douthat. It is always reassuring to read that someone else feels the same.
Of more concern to some of us is the reduction of 16% in sales. That thought is a knife in the heart of aspiring writers and is depressing. During the Great Depression Sinclair Lewis wrote a piece for The Yale Literary Magazine saying, "I suspect that in the future a writer will be able to make a respectable living only by toiling for the radio or Hollywood..." The decline in literary canon could be rerouted if our educational system would pay more attention to teaching and less attention to shiny objects.
5
We are, hopefully, just going through a Dark Age with regard to intellectual activity -- careful reading, listening, reasoning, and thinking in general -- and will awaken from it as we have cyclically for generations. I don't know how long the cycles tend to persist, but we do tend to crave greater meaning after long periods of materialism and/or mindless popular cultural material and messages that don't seem to fit our experiences or enrich our mental states.
4
Thank you. Reading demands undivided attention, and that is essentially the only way reading competes, or can ever compete, with any wireless mobile device or WMD. The ‘undivided attention’ required of reading anything seriously is a catalyst for personal intimacy and can deepen social discourse on all levels of living, and yes WMD’s not the Internet can and do get in the way. I find the most gratifying aspect of reading to be the journey, or how the search for understanding isn’t miraculous at all but becomes constantly edifying and only thereby surprising. The great novelists, and I do mean truly great not just American, are definitely and most discernibly not just “out there” but are here in our midst.
2
On a hopeful note, there’s a case to be made that poetry, especially in performance, is a literary form better suited to the visually oriented, insta-consumerist audience of today than the sprawling, immersive “worlds” of the classic 19th and 20th century novels. I still read them myself. But as a writer I work free from the delusion that there will be readers in the future. Even if we manage to pull through, save the planet, avert the right wing dystopia, there still won’t be readers, not after the current generation. There may be audiences for poetry however, in part because of poetry’s deep, if generally hidden, ties to kitsch, which helps it thrive on social media.
6
I too am in mourning for the loss of this practice/ tradition and the voluntary alienation from the format, (reading with a book in my hand), for the screen, which cannot replace the thrill we still cherish.
I covet a shaky theory that one day we will get used to the unbelievability of having the worlds biggest library in our laps, or in our back pocket, and will come running back to the thrill of peace and edification that comes with sitting, reading, a novel
3
I like TV, but I love books. I own over 3000 print books, and have run out of room, so now I buy e-books. Most of my discretionary income is spent on books.
I am the only one in my family who lives for books. My late mother, who was legally blind, learned to love books on tape and we would sit for hours listening and discussing what we were hearing. My dad, brothers and sisters were bored to tears by books and preferred to "wait until the movie comes out."
11
Dave Eggers.
But you probably have a point. However, the serial TV series in good hands is a worthy successor to the novel. Have you seen anything written by Sally Wainwright, e.g., Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley, Scott and Bailey? Or Linda La Plante's Prime Suspect, from the 90's? Thought these are often technically crime stories, they are also moral explorations of high quality.
And, lord knows Breaking Bad was sensationalistic crime fiction, but was more, and was also more intense and riveting than a good many great books.
The ancient Dialogue was a petty literary device until Plato took it up. And the Athenian drama festival was stories from Homer retold through a brand-new device, the acted play. Something was lost, but much more was gained.
6
I passionately disagree with your assessment that present day mini-series such as Breaking Bad, whatever their Shakespearean-sized tragedy, and ability to make us look into the human condition while lasciviously watching imagery of their antiheroes consumed by meth-addiction, can supplant the infinitely more relevant experience of reading.
It’s an old bromide that one is forever admonished for seeing the movie a novel is based upon before reading its source. Almost every film created from a work of prose fiction usually falls far short of the reader’s co-creation, resulting from the wedded imaginations of the author and the reader in their intimate, private, dance of shared art and discovery.
While it is true that narrative filmmaking and television programming can and do engage our intellects, hearts and minds. I dare say that by sparing the audience the trouble of engaging their brains and imaginations in the far more profound experience that reading forces upon a person’s intellect, that they suffer a greater tragedy. The atrophy of our brains ability to imagine. Everything is pre-fabricated for their lazy, passive occupation of ingesting stories with the least effort possible.
Like the death of handwriting, lost to keyboard texting, has resulted in the immeasurable loss of incredible subtlety found in the human voice in telephone conversation. The result is a dumbed-down life. A vastly mediocre replacement of one’s own imagination given over willingly to Hollywood.
1
Take a lit class at the local library o4 community center. That automatically refreshes your mind and allows you to get stuck in to some piece of great literature ( just like in the old days). Recently took a wonderful 3 month Kafka seminar taught by a professor emeritus.
4
Oh, Ross, how many times have I read this lament about the demise of the novel and reading? Was the first time when the Big Bopper made the scene or was it Elvis? I’m not old enough to have heard the admonitions against dime novels, comic books and radio.
Write novels that capture my attention and I’ll put my iPhone down. Too many today are neither insightful nor entertaining.
Don’t blame digital culture for the inconvenient truth that publishers are more entranced by making money than by taking risks on unproven writers.
It may be the digital age that advances the novel. Self-publishing and a vast community of online readers hold great potential.
The next great American novelist may reach me on my iPhone. And that’s fine with me.
As matter of fact I read your column on my iPhone. When you write at the top of your game, I read it through and pay no attention to the notifications. When you don’t... oh, there’s a tweet a swipe away.
5
The American Novel is not dead. The American Novel is Alive and Well. What is dying is the Manhattan Writing Establishment, which has, for generations, decided for all Americans what they should be reading. A handful of mostly Ivy League educated editors and agents have dictated for generations what constitutes worthwhile storytelling. Now technology allows novelists to publish their works in excellent hardcover, paperback, electronic, and audio editions. The Golden Age of the Great American Novel is upon us. Readers delight! One suggestion if you enjoy Historical Fiction: Annie's War. READ ON!
15
The American novel has been lying in state, mourned by the newly bereaved, for as long as I can remember. Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, my English professors regularly lamented that there were no more great novelists. Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor were all dead, and given the present degraded cultural scene it was impossible to imagine anyone coming along who was even worthy of being called a successor. This at a time when Philip Roth, James Salter, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and, yes, Toni Morrison were all in mid-career. Talent is a constant, and so is the hyperopia of critics, who can see clearly only what is distant and cannot focus on what is right in front of them.
31
Mr. Douthat writes that “Today technocracy is crushing the English department and the equivalent debates are often about representation in Marvel movies.” I didn’t realize that the fate of literature was in the dry academic hands of English departments, who, in my book, are to literature what musicologists are to music: little connection.
10
There are plenty of great American novelists including the following that my book club has read. Some old, many new. Jennifer Egan, Lisa Halliday, Tommy Orange, Jacqueline Woodson, Amor Towels, Jesmyn Ward, Paulette Jiles, George Sanders, Richard Russo, Michael Chabon. And there are many other great American writers.
17
Douthat calls Morrison "The Last Great American Novelist." In fact, she is the last great modernist novelist. Still writing is America's great post-modern novelist, Don DeLillo. In novel after novel, he diagnoses the cultural and literary shifts that Douthat says have reduced the importance of the novel. Read, for example, "Mao II." Morrison's best novels were historical. When she tried to do contemporary in her last novel, it was very weak. DeLillo's novels are relentlessly contemporary, even futuristic. They often deal with the very media that Douthat analyzes. For a quick representative contrast, consider Morrison's "Jazz" and DeLillo's "White Noise." Morrison's great subject was race. DeLillo's is everything. Douthat is right about Morrison as celebrity. DeLillo prefers invisibility, the better to observe the present. Morrison wanted readers, a mass audience. DeLillo wants to, in his words, "advance the art." I've read all the fiction by both writers. I have interviewed both. I love Morrison's work, but DeLillo's is wider and "greater."
6
@araliki. I don't think the evaluative comparison is warranted. We don't have to relentlessly put all novels into a hierarchical Great Chain of Being where each is judged superior or inferior to the last. Both of. these writers have made lasting contributions to American literature, in part for different reasons.
2
On the other hand, we seem to be experiencing a substantial rise in the number of book clubs, both in people's living rooms and online. I'd say that 50 per cent or more of my friends and acquaintances belong to a discussion group that meets regularly to share views not only of current best sellers, but also of obscure classics (many published by the New York Review's imprint) and members of the so-called literary canon. Another promising phenomenon is the emergence of so many outstanding novelists from cultures once considered exotic and outside the mainstream. Perhaps the only thing that can fairly be called obsolete is the concept of the "Great American Novel."
9
@Charles Michener Most book clubs read forgettable popular novels. That you need to pontificate about "the Great American Novel" is irrelevant.
Maybe really good novelists (i.e., Faulkner, Hemingway for a while) won't be able to make a living as such and have to go to Hollywood and write scripts and we'll get better movies! Of course, I'm not sure there's people around like Irving Thalberg to recognize and hire them.
By the way, in my humble opinion, the great American novel of the nineteenth century was Huckleberry Finn, of the twentieth century Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy (I think the novels were 1919, 42nd Parallel and The Big Money). Don't despair, Mr. Stephens, we've got time to find the great American novel of the XXIst! She/He may be writing it as we speak!
7
We live in a time of "Last Great".
E.g., Nelson Mandela will probably be the "Last Great Hero" on a national or international stage.
Of course, Malala IS a heroic figure. But it's way too much to expect that she will be able to change Pakistan. No hero or heroine would do that.
Sadly, America is probably the last country on Earth which would produce a true 'hero" or "heroine."
1
After the 2016 election, I went into a dark spiral where I could not bear to view or read any news about politics. I turned to what has always been my salvation, I read a dozen books in three or four months. Books have always been a way to come back from the abyss.
Another thing that saved me was going to Washington for the women’s march in January 2017.
17
An interesting piece and one mercifully devoid of political or religious underpinnings.
The internet via a device that's at hand at all times is clearly a species of addiction. At very least it eats time otherwise available for alternate pursuits.
The argument that it also has a deleterious effect on focus and attention span is more unsettled, but seems indeed to be the case.
And when I am reading a novel these days, when encountering an unfamiliar regional turn of phrase, or bit of interesting geography or a historical reference, I'm likely to do bit of Googling which tends to lead to an extended session of Wikipedia surfing as I click from link to related link.
This is not without its own merits, but it surely halts the flow of the novel's prose and makes the novel reading experience itself different and not in a good way.
As I said, interesting piece.
7
At a certain age, which I am daily astonished to have reached, nothing seems to be as good as it once was, not literature, baseball or lately, vanilla milkshakes. Part of it is the age-enhanced remembrance with which we sweeten memory, but mostly I think the issue is the money-sickness that now pervades every aspect of life, because of which everything is watered down for mass consumption and massive profit. The internet, in fact, enables my quest for authentic experiences in literature and sport. It may even help me find a small town drug store that still has a soda fountain.
9
I totally agree with your conclusion, Ross. But I think it’s about much more than novels. The iPhone/FB/Twitter culture is killing our ability to concentrate deeply on something for a prolonged period of time. Even reading the NYT, a newspaper with fairly lengthy and in-depth articles, on my iPhone is a constant distraction.
Try getting on a plane the next time you fly and read a paper copy of the NYT without taking out your phone once. It’s increasingly a challenge.
I think a whole generation is losing the ability to concentrate in this way. What is at stake are not just certain art forms like the novel or classical music, but creativity itself (which requires concentration) and contemplation (which requires letting your mind wander without worrying about the next tweet).
I’m not sure what the solution is but I’m sure it’s not for every kid in school to get a free iPad.
10
Here’s a hint. I just finished Sally Rooney’s novel, “Conversations with Friends”, mostly read in the evening with the Red Sox game muted in the background glancing occasionally to catch the score. Very effective way to do both.
2
The "adult" novel is a relatively new invention, dating back, roughly, to Henry James. Before that time, novels were expected to be experienced by a wide audience, including both children and adults. I say "experienced" rather than "read," because social reading -- reading out loud for assembled audiences in parlors and in public places -- was widespread. In this sense, the prominence of YA lit and genre fiction in the current book marketplace isn't new: it's a return to form.
5
We live in an era of nonfiction, news, memoir because as we lurch from one crises to another, there’s a profusion of information available, much of it accessible on our phones, iPads, computers. It’s hard to focus on a novel when there are books like Falter and Uninhabitable Earth out there. Meanwhile the creative talent has migrated to television with shows like The Wire, The Americans, even Game of Thrones (before the writers lost their way) as likely to have their thumb on the nexus of art and content. I’d add Revolutionary Road to Douthat’s list of last great American novels. Normal People does seem to capture what it’s like to be young today and it’s compelling enough to drag your attention away from all the tech options.
1
Children are also abandoning the delight of fiction in print form. A pivotal issue is that the pace of the action is much faster on-screen than in text. Attuned to the pace of Fortnite, they "tune out" to the pace of the enchanting development of characters, plots, and place in novels. I watch them and grieve for their loss--the childrens' loss, that is.
3
@Judy How many kids do you have in your life? My experience couldn't be more different. I have a kid who doesn't read much and kids who do. If you look at publishing trends, you'll see that children's books, picture books, middle grade books and young adult books, are all experiencing a lot of sales growth. Somebody's reading them!
4
Some of my friends have started a “big book” book club in which we read a big book very slowly. Everybody says they are really busy so we assign a manageable chunk (100-200 pages). We’ve read classics but also moderns like David foster Wallace. The discussions have been great.
7
I can vouch for pairing novels in e-book format with using a treadmill or similar device as not only thoroughly modern but an immensely satisfying novel-reading experience. Intellectual, emotional and physical exercise, all at once!
4
I do the same. It is a remarkable way to maximize the short time we are given on planet earth, some shorter than others.
2
@Manuel Alvarado
I too "read" with e-books while cooking, walking, driving, on the subway. I've always been a reader with usually about 5 books on my night table, but now that I can read while doing other things I actually read more.
1
@Manuel Alvarado
Profound experience?
This parenthesis stopped me in the narrative:
"(I have a similar experience with another lost love, baseball, where now I only watch the playoffs.)"
I have heard fans of other sports relate this, but rarely for baseball, whose 'regular' season lasts 162 games.
Watching only post-season games is kin to reading only the final chapter of novels. Isn't this what some high school students do?
6
Ross, your previous thoughts to paper hint at a Catholic education. You appreciate the classics of yesteryear and beyond because they're a continuum of a storied past - a past where tension and conflict between two or more dynamic forces becomes the model of a Christian upbringing where good versus evil becomes the mainstay of everyday life.
That most clearly, as you succintly describe, has changed with social media and it has softened the mind of a generation where the line between good and evil is now blurred to where what was once immediately apparent as wrong, now becomes maybe as to its dark side.
Women are less distracted with these things in my view. They read voraciously, with the people I know, as long as the practicum of home and economic security is maintained. Toni Morrison must have tapped into her gender's ability to see the world in a larger context and to fear the nuances of the darker side creeping in.
This was one of your more beautifully written and telling pieces. Thank you.
5
The novel started its life as trash. It was considered the work of the Devil and a corrupter of minds. It developed as a literary form because of the Great Technological Revolution of the printing press AND the rise of a middle class — the ladies of which had the spare time and reading ability to indulge.
So please, sure, every communication revolution eventually becomes a dazzling art form, unifies a culture and becomes a “voice” to be aspired to.
But I wouldn’t bewail the end of the novel. Book publishing has never been better than its media competitors. I would bewail the brain-eating distractions that are upon us now. Live long enough and you’ll see GOT hailed as worthy of a Nobel.
I gave up reading fiction decades ago. The real world is way more interesting. I can critique my culture without the aid of fiction. The mind-blowing-ness of non-fiction takes up all my time. I wish I had more time to spend on it. The novel comes from a slower time.
1
Research suggests that reading fiction is emotionally healthy. It brings us into not just the action but the emotions behind the action and the inaction. Though I love non-fiction" since the publication of these findings I have made a point of reading more fiction. I am convinced it is good for the psyche. In a world with too much hurt to me that is of paramount importance.
9
I prefer the fictions of the Golden Age of Painting, 1850-1950. A brilliantly executed painting is worth a hundred thousand words.
1
@joymars—Imagine that, a person who actually believes that fiction has no connection to the “real world.” Excellent idea for a novel.
1
I have the luxury of leisure which allows me to read everyday in a public library between 2-5pm leaving behind all 'devices'. Works for me.
13
Because I’m an avid reader and passionate about good literature, I volunteered as a parent representative to my children’s middle school literacy committee. The English teachers were lamenting the students’ performance on the writing portion of the annual standardized tests.
I pointed out that my daughter’s 7th grade class had read three chapters of “The Hobbit” but never finished the whole novel. The teachers replied that the district specifies that the three chapters are all they are allowed to cover.
How can they learn to be good writers, I asked, if they are not reading and dissecting the entirety of good writing — not just 1/5 of the book? For many kids the only time they will read any literature — quality or otherwise — is in school.
Because Ross is correct: there is so much competing for all of our attention — kids & adults alike — novels seem to get tossed aside for shinier objects. Reading requires work and effort—unlike TV watching or social media interactions — but the rewards are immeasurable. My best time of day is right before bed when I read for 30-45 minutes to unwind.
Further, studies have found that reading fiction actually enhances empathy. And boy, do we need more empathy these days.
26
@EWood
The goal of reading chapters instead of the entire book is to teach students to read closely, analyze and discuss aspects of literature. Reading an entire novel this way can take weeks unless you are superficially glossing through it. It is more valuable to spend time reading a wider array of materials in a deeper way. Many students go on to complete the books on their own, which is the goal. As you suggest, the rewards are immeasurable.
4
@EWood I would think that if the kids liked the first three chapters of "The Hobbit" they could read the rest of the novel over summer break. But maybe I'm hopelessly naive and out of touch.
1
Ross Douthat bemoans the fact that, sales of adult fiction have slumped, and that novelists find it harder to earn a living.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that average people aren't earning much money, that the meager salaries they do earn have to go to heat and food an fuel and debt, including college debt, so the funds available to buy books is now less. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that college is increasingly too expensive for average folks to afford, resulting in college completion rates that lag badly behind many other developed and industrializing countries. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that only computer and engineering graduates can earn a decent living, and they are too engrossed in their computers to open novels.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that fewer and fewer people have the time to read novels, because more and more are having to work longer and longer hours.
And perhaps its simply a result of the cruelty Republicans are inflicting on America that leaves decent people numb to life.
Perhaps that's why.
31
@Sean I would think that if money is an issue, average people can go to the library and check out books for free. But maybe I'm hopelessly naive and out of touch.
14
It's not just the money for th books; it's time. When people must take on part-time jobs or side hustles to make ends meet, there's less time and energy to go to the library or to read.
9
Today, library consortia all offer ebooks and books on tape. You can read or listen while you commute, grocery shop, do the laundry, clean house, etc.
2
Thank you for this column, Ross. I already see a number of good novels to try in the comments. Oprah I think tries to maintain the book culture you talk about. I've enjoyed many of her selections. Since I love your column, and enjoyed most of the books you discuss in this one, maybe you want to create a book club as well?
1
I so miss having the amount of TIME that I had when younger, in my 20s and 30s, and discovering/reading so many great novelists, discussing with friends etc. Having that time is a key ingredient for getting lost in a novel. Work schedules, family schedules and kids, for some, and being available 24/7 really cuts into that time. Here I am reading snippets of the NYT rather than reading a book. Lots of great recommendations in the comments, though...thank you!
12
@Carla Yes can you imagine the difference if you worked 35 h/ week with 5 weeks paid vacation per year for everybody like in France. Free health care brings also less stress. In France people still read, There are public radio shows to give them actuality of the cultural life.
Americans don't read, No book stores, no public culture .
9
Yes! Read any NYT article regarding how the amount of hours “required” for parenting has changed over the last few decades.
3
Interesting thoughts on the novel. I caught the St. Augustine reference. Nice.
I read an odd comment in the WP responding to a summer reading list. The commenter stated with all self-confidence that there is no new great fiction. I really don’t get that. I love so-called classics and love countless newer writer, including Rooney. My husband is reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I also loved. I have made recommendations to my son, such as to read Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and then Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Police . .. I suggested he read Stoner and then All That Is by James Salter. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for me to stay informed about the world and to read as much literature as I’d like.
8
In the ebb and flow of human evolution fads will come and go, but novels will survive because they tell us who we are.
4
Just one comment, the Great Gatsby seems overrated now. The speech sounds like made up dialogue and the characters are hollow.
Re fiction - I am guessing that fiction or the telling of stories will continue and new giants will emerge over time. They may be walking amongst us right now - though likely not after passing through an MFA program.
2
I disagree with you on Gatsby. It is a poetic look ata greedy world and isn't meant to be realist chatter.
6
One misses the intimate tone of classical authors in modern authors which share a state of mind and point of view with you the readers, such as one finds in Shakespeare’s sonnets and Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Faulkner, and Larry McMurtry, etc.. Above all one misses the shared vernacular that recreates the striking images of an idea reconstructing the meaning of a memory like theirs.
2
The deep dive into great fiction is still enthralling. Last month I decided to reread PRISONS, the first installment of Mary Lee Settle's "Beulah Quintet", which traces the develpment of West Virginia from the ideas of the 1640s Puritan Levlers through the 1980s, with stops in the early frontier days, the antebellum period, the mine wars and the disillusioned 80s. Within a week I had read them all, trasnported by her vision of an evolving society and the brilliance of her writing.
2
I rarely read Mr. Douthat, but I love novels and reading in spite of my distracted presence in the digital age so I managed to focus on his 2000 words without even taking a sip of coffee. My conclusion is that is nothing wrong with the "American Novel", only with the people reading it and writing about it.
9
Thanks Mr. Douthat.
Really, it has all been written already.
Human emotions, conflicts, historical understandings...
Perhaps there are further refinements possible, perhaps.
But it is all there if one really wishes to understand, and not simply to view the fantastic dreamscapes of Superman, Aquaman, Batman, Titans, etc etc.
And what is this modern present-day fascination with the supernatural and occult?
How many movies have to be made capturing the viewership of the metaphysically distracted about ghosts and some sort of bizarre afterlife nonsense?
Nothing better illustrates our educational void and the net-earnings obsession of today's media than the subject matter of today's movie industry.
Just think about all the wasted intellectual energy- not just the cost involved and the scurrilous profit- in making all of these absolutely nonsensical films, streamed there to look at after smoking reefer while gorging on pizza.
But let us be sympathetic.
Living in today's world, working two or three jobs, trying not to think about the fresh outrage of the moment, like Jeffers said, "falling like rocks in the dark" we desperately need the distraction.
6
Before print media was available, stories were told orally and through the visual arts. If our species survives, we'll probably at some point adopt a new way of telling stories. Storytelling is part of being human; I doubt that's going to change.
8
This brings to mind Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," a phrase that eradicates the possibility of any subsequent generation's greatness. There are, and will be, great American novelists.
5
I have a Kindle and I can read two books just be going back and forth and not have to carry the physical ones around with me. It makes reading better.
There are many great writers.
3
Literature allows you to inhabit other lives. Great literary fiction is often truer than fact, and fleshes out people and/or events. The alienation of the individual captured in Camus's " The Stranger ", the changing reality of race and gender in South Africa, chronicled in Coetzee's " Disgrace ", and the brutal legacy of slavery and miscegenation in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, are all monuments to the intrinsic value of literature. It is truly the language of life. The process of reading and internalizing a novel requires time and critical thinking. The technology revolution has altered the use of time and intellectual analysis has given way to instant gratification.The American novel may be IT's most egregious casualty.
13
@Don Shipp. Well said, Mr Shipp. A smart phone provides many benefits, such as the ability to retrieve any fact about the world in moments. But its addictive power fragments concentration and prevents immersion in a book. When I walk the 15 minutes between home and work, in a neighborhood where most people are doing the same, I sometimes count how many consecutive walkers are staring down at their phones. Forget reading a book for a solid hour or two. They can't even take a 15 minute walk without a distraction.
6
I am an unabashed digital connoisseur: social media, online subscriptions to the Times and the Post, often a video game on the PlayStation.
But nothing gives me more joy or contentment than a novel. If I could only choose one form of entertainment, it would be written fiction.
I don't believe we are in any danger of losing the medium. Perhaps the manner in which it is delivered or consumed with face the inevitable shake up, but the desire itself for an immersive, long-form narrative? I feel confident it is here to stay.
5
Aw, c'mon, Mr. Douthat! I know it's a periodic temptation to newspaper pundits to write articles with the words "The Last Great..." in the headline. The Last Great Politician. The Last Great Ballplayer. The Last Great Socialite. But the "Last Great American Novelist?" Seriously?
Look -- Toni Morrison was a truly great novelist and her works a touchstone of American literature. She will be read as long as people read. But she was not the last great American novelist. Not while we have Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, Thomas Pynchon,
Ann Beattie, Don Delillo, Louise Erdrich, and (relative) newcomers such as Allegra Goodman, Marlon James, Amy Bloom, and Tommy Orange with us.
Moreover, the viability of good fiction (or any other art form, for that matter) cannot be based solely on market fluctuations. Would you maintain that journalism is a languishing art because newspaper sales have declined in the past couple decades?
20
Thanks. I've been saying that for quite awhile.@Jimbo
1
@Jimbo
try john williams- stoner and then --AUGUSTUS!!
It may seem surprising but as a Trump supporter I believe there might be be value in others reading an occasional novel.
1
@Michael Dowd -
Leaving aside your specific beliefs, if you find yourself defending your interest in reading for pleasure based on your political affiliations, isn’t that a bit disturbing? That you’ve taken to heart the idea that your political allies probably don’t like reading?
For that matter, even if I agreed with Trump on all political points, I think I’d still find it disturbing how much disdain the man has for reading. The Presidency is a difficult, intellectually demanding job, and a man who won’t read written intelligence briefings shouldn’t be doing it.
16
@Gus My remark was intended to be humorous highlighting Democrats view of Trump voters.
Born in 1957. I grew up an avid reader. I cannot readily explain when and where I lost concentration and focus. As a child, I read Dr. Doolittle. As a young boy, I read Jack London, Bradbury, Asimov, and Orwell. In college, I read widely. Now, with sweet time on my side, I struggle to read complex novels. Faulkner was once was nearer to me than he is today. Why? I cannot blame social media. I cannot blame my computer or iPhone. It is my responsibility to remain alert and aware.
4
After 50 years Faulkner still remains distant to my reading taste. I've tried Sound and the Fury and still can't get past the "he said", "she said", format for dialogue. I do love his short stories, however.@Bill
Although certainly no expert in this area, my liberal arts schooling, did introduce me to a number of great novels that for me, brought out the complexity of human behavior and emotions--- Too often I forgot how complex humans can be---especially when it comes to outer appearances and inner feelings. I continue to be taken back at social gatherings by what I considered well-educated professionals, who not only voted for Trump, but, even today, have developed elaborate justifications for clearly abhorrent behavior---as if serial philandering, serial business scams, serial lying, is normal...
11
@Amanda Jones Isn't it? If you read the news that is all politicians and celebrities do. Billionaires own basketball teams but hate the race of the players who make them money. Actors and actresses wed in exotic, secluded locales and have casual sex, exciting divorces and bonkers political views. There's also a revolution in storm reporting. Give us the number of people who are in the path of a storm. 200 million people in the path of a storm! And yet it's a horrible gimmick whose side effect is confusing my grandma and the method of reporting doesn't increase or decrease the stable effect of a 40 mph gust. I guess it's obvious I'm not impressed by reporting and the priority is money not journalism according to me which likely is too harsh a judgement. I'm sure every writer throws it together some times. I did that in college all the time. Anyway...
1
The struggle over technology's hold on our energies has been going on longer than the short lifespan of the Internet. Talk to anyone with a scientific bend of mind and they will tell you the only things worth knowing are empirical. If something is not liable to be disproven it is not worth their time.
Novels do not fit this bill but they do offer insight into mortality and the purpose of living. No novel is however essential to understanding this. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Critics can only hope to communicate to us what sublime lessons on life are to be found there if one is only willing to look.
Yes, the Internet is putting culture under a roller compressor, and we are living in an age of non-fiction. It has its consolations. After reading a string of books on history and philosophy or even about older plays and novels it is a pleasure to stumble upon a new novel and to realize that writing a good one can still be done.
2
"it’s the internet that’s killing novel-reading"
Not entirely, or even primarily. It's storytelling as a visual medium that's killing novel-reading. Some people read the Song of Ice and Fire books, but more people watch Game of Thrones. People go on Netflix, Roku, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc for their fiction nowadays. They see it; they don't imagine it. That and the fact the people's mental lives are invested in nonfiction, as a matter of work, and habit. The literary novel occupies less and less space in the American zeitgeist - it's memoirs, long-form journalism, academic studies, cookbooks, YA, cheesy upmarket, and escapist genre material that sell in book form. Increasingly, serious fiction via the written word is a genre propped up by academia; it's gone the route of poetry.
10
For three years I lived out of my car. I read War and Peace, a lot of Hemingway, a lot of Steinbeck, etc... One day I was reading the Iliad at a beach. I overheard that a homeless person, like me, had died and later learned he'd been killed. I spent the night with gathered cans, parked at a library without sleep and with rashes and with the actual experience of terror piercing my brain for several hours. A couple years later, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia but none of that was hallucinated. My symptom is disorganized thoughts and about seven years from when I saw a psychiatrist, I have a good job. The closest story I read to my predicament might be A Way You'll Never Be by Hemingway. It's about a soldier whose actions make no sense except to his peers who may have felt it themselves, shell shock, PTSD or whatever a person feels in a trench, in a war. So the point? While some of the most inspiring lines I've heard come from movies like their are no rules to this thing from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (yes, I read the short story) as well as books like the first lines of Invisible Man, I am only ashamed that I have been ashamed, they are not racing against each other. The real competition is between reality and fiction. At the end of James Michener's book The Drifter's the young woman who is with the on-site well traveled repair man says she wants to send her father to Ceylon because people should see the places they dream about.
20
A few thoughts.
Is Crime and Punishment a police procedural or a great novel? Is the Brothers Karamazov a murder mystery? Is Brave New World dystopian science fiction? It is not wise to dismiss a novel or its writer on the basis of genre labelling. Some great novels may yet arise out of the murder and mayhem of the last few weeks in the United States. Maybe some young adult, mystery, spy, etc. novels will be considered great. John Le Carré who I think is a worthy successor to Conrad and Greene may not have written a Great novel but he has written great ones.
I go to my local independent bookstore and just feel overwhelmed by the number of new books. Or maybe there is a pile of books by a recently elevated author who died a while back. Or some Latin American or East European writer is finally being given their due. So, where do I begin? The problem is that there are too many great writers and not enough time to read them all. Which is why I like to think of heaven as a giant library.
24
@Allan I too find Le Carré’s novels engrossing, they shouldn’t be pigeonholed as spy novels—they are enjoyable for showing the twistiness of the inner mind, shaped by memories and critical decisions.
4
@mkneller I, too, think that LeCarre is much more than a (just a) spy novelist. I consider “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and a couple of the Smiley books (especially Tinker, Taylor) to be outstanding literature.
@Allan Let me answer your first three questions: no, no, and maybe. Voila!
Another great American novelist, Philip Roth, was interviewed in 2013 on his 80th birthday.
Even then, he said we live in the 'Age of Screens'.
He said that in 20 years (2033) he felt that the same percentage of the American public would be reading 'serious' novels.....as were reading poetry 100 years ago (1913).
And he found that idea very disappointing.
Or was Mr. Roth missing something there?
5
Mr. Douthat, Re. the new Sally Rooney novel, “Normal People,” I don't have any idea if Ms. Rooney is the Great Irish-Millennial Novelist, but having read both her novels recently (& reviews of them) I think she is definitely at least as good a writer as her excellent reviews suggest. I strongly recommend you take a break from whatever is distracting you and read "Normal People", the book you have on your dresser.
I have found that reading good novels is a great way to take a break from the world's troubles without missing a thing, and feeling that the time was well spent. The troubles don't change much while I'm reading a good novel, but I am better equipped to keep them in perspective for having read one.
6
This is why I don't like to read YOU, Mr. Douthat - you are stuck. Yes, Morrison was a great writer. But the world is full of great writers, yes, even today. Try Elena Ferrante, Richard Powers, Miriam Towes, Karl Ove Knaussgard. For starters. The trick is to drop that "American" label. We live in a larger world now. And the music, writing, painting we can explore are all fantastic.
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@SFR thank you for the recommendations. I think this is something that we see often from Americans: forgetting that there are, in fact, other countries on the planet.
9
@Kyle. It's not forgetting. It's not knowing. There are people who live in Manhattan Beach who've never been to Lawndale. Happens all over, though. It's mainly because my older sister was adventurous that I've been out of the country. I was fortunate to see the Atocha train station in Madrid when it was repaired and realized the Spanish government dealt with the aftermath of the bombing without the lock down that followed 9/11 in the US.
8
Oh, the novel will survive your concern. It's true we don't live in the same world in which the latest installment of "The Old Curiosity Shop" arrives in New York Harbor with people on the docks shouting "did she die?" But that's more because there is no writer alive (and very few dead) who can come within a light-year of Dickens's ability to seize your heart and tear it out and stomp on it and put it back leaving you a better human being for the experience. When that person arrives on the scene there will be plenty of novel-reading. Until then--well, I'm gonna go watch "The Borgias." And maybe brush up my Shakespeare.
7
Most I know read novels, but they might not be up to the T. Morrison standard. They might be way below. Nonetheless, they read. You can see it on every flight from here to there. The mystery, murder, detective books are endless and are read endlessly. They are as much novels as anything else. I have tried over and over again to read James Joyce and must confess that I will die not having completed Ulysses or that other incomprehensible novel called the Bible.
15
@John I too have been bested by Ulysses. I tackled it on two separate occasions and was unable to make sense out of anything past page 9.
5
@Ashleigh
Thank you. Now I know I'm not alone. The autobiography of William Butler Yeats has the same self-defeating ending. Such a poet, but not good writing a personal-semi-novel. I have given up on modern novels, but I do go back to Shakespeare. Frequently. When necessary.
3
@John
our reading group spent 2-3 hours every month for seven years on ulysses- it was life changing....!!1
Ross, most of the time I read your articles and can’t believe we shared every single class together in middle and high school. So disconnected our worlds have become that I struggle to understand how we shared anything in our formative years. This one reminds me that yes, we do have common roots. Best, Caitlin
5
Allow me not to reply to the part of Toni Morrison, who is, though, the major part of the column from which the Douthat’s concise literary theory evolved. She was and is, in particular now, too big for me. Literary engagement differs from person to person by its degree, nature, thus, level of commitment. In one word, it is about intensified energy. When busy, therefore, one may seek or desire prompt situmulations or less demanding emotional reactions in familiarity, which means little mental efforts as required. However, here is a secret. A good book is a world by itself, which can take readers away from readers-selves. Sometimes it is called ecstasy (not meant to be concretely physical). The columnist also discussed the link between digitally oriented apprehensions and today’s readership. In the 19th century, one’s visual references were nature, natural phenomena, man-made objects, towns, cities, and occasionally theatrical events and so on. In the medieval era, birds wrote poetic lines in the sky and ordinary people don’t read but experienced stories. Today or in the future, I hope one would not see the world to be digitally written as if successive tweets of astonishing speed, or only seek YouTube adaptable scenes for consumptions.
1
Readers, do not lament "the last of..." The novel is alive and well despite the Internet onslaughts and the overall Age of Distraction.
The universality of English has led to an international flowering of fiction that Americans are only slowly warming to.
How many years ago was it that Saul Bellow, receiving heaps of praise, reminded his listeners that, in America, fiction writing was no more important than ice skating?
When Bellow passed, we hate a spate of articles about the passing of the last great novelist.
5
Don Dellilo and Thomas Pynchon are still with us. White Noise is a great American novel. So are Underworld, Gravity's Rainbow, and The Crying of Lot 49.
7
@Anti-Marx Sounds like you need to catch up on your Pynchon. His books since the early years are great. Many are clearly better than Lot 49. Enjoy.
Thanks for putting to words what I've been wondering about in my own life for a while. I used to always have a book going. Now, there's been a long hiatus.
What'? grabbing my attention? The internet. I think I may have become addicted to the distraction it provides. I don't have to put out much effort out to become engaged.
As satisfying as a good book? I think not. But still I persist.
6
Like most things, the Great American Novel has been off-shored, now produced by publishing globalists, with brilliant execution, authored by a new generation of novelists residing in England, Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Canada, Japan...with even some copyrights originating in ubiquitous China.
Even the best of a new breed of American born novelist are often finding that only publishers across The Pond are willing to take a risk marketing the debut effort of an untested author. And, many new authors are forced to roll the dice and self-publish.
Truthfully, the national origin of a novel should be of little importance to society. What's of real important is that we all explore the joys of fictional reads, because, on the whole, we humans are greatly served by individually taking the time to pursue storied journeys in the pages of books.
4
Thomas Pynchon
9
Art never reproduces the past.
Art is primarily in the hands of youthful men and women who will reach out into hitherto unexplored regions and use new and novel forms to capture the ethos of their generation.
For instance, Dickens and Dumas capitalized on the serial published weekly by the burgeoning newspaper industry of the 1800s to forge a new art form, the novel.
You can bet the new generation will capitalize on the resources of its developing virtual world to express the future American experience.
To find art, look forward (not backwards). Art is happening when we are making other plans.
7
I sympathize with Douthat's argument and even more so with some of the commentators. As the teaching of literature declines, so does, it seems, the quality of its production. For years, my reading of the Times book review section has left me wondering why the vast majority of novels reviewed were published in the first place. Still, I'm an inveterate reader, and it still can completely absorb me - for instance, the laconic spy novels of Alan Furst, the Shardlake adventures of CJ Samson, the short stories of John O'Hara and, indispensable to escape the daily horror of our current president, PG Wodehouse.
8
Be serious, whatever her merits, the debate will hardly touch America culture - not because the novel is “dead” - but because the internet’s fascinations have replaced serious or even unserious reading. But crosswords may survive - because those who can do them to completion are rewarded with the pleasure of thinking they are smart. Novels don’t do that for you, except if you can get through something as impenetrable as the works of the latest wunderkind.
1
The poet, critic, and Yale professor John Hollander liked to say, "In the future, poetry will matter more and more to fewer and fewer people." And maybe something like that should be said about the novel, and novelists. There won't be another Toni Morrison. However, Colson Whitehead has a great and growing reputation, and there's no telling what his full body of work will amount to. Richard Powers is another great and versatile novelist: each of his books finds new ways of presenting characters and developing themes important in our culture.
Alongside the novel, for people who still enjoy long form and artful writing, books categorized as "imaginative non-fiction" are being written, finding publishers and readers. Barry Lopez has crowned his long career with "Horizon": a compendium of personal narratives, scientific inquiry, evocations of many exotic and extreme landscapes, and deep insight into the long history of the human species and our present global predicament.
7
@Jon Quitslund Hollander was wrong. Poetry now sells more books than ever before, but the broader readership is dominated by slam poets and shallowly appreciated Instagram-poets now publishing books that sell many times more copies than Ashbery or Ginsberg or Bishop, etc. ever did. Modernism lost.
@Jon Quitslund yes, I feel he issue is more a lack of great readers than of great writers. Colson Whitehead is, indeed, a great and important writer. Read his stuff.
Our book club has been going strong for about 15 years. We read only fiction, by consensus. We are 11 members strong and have people begging to join. We read novels from writers of many nations, written in English or in translation. The novel lives!
12
I would also add Styron to the list of great American novelists, especially "Sophie's Choice." Call me Stingo.
4
I'm still immersed in new novels, some by Slamini and Gorsuch that I could not put down, The Perfect Nanny and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. And of course Hurakami.
1
I am always on the prowl for good novels. In the past few years, I have been lucky to read excellent novels like Half of a Yellow Sun, Pachinko, Standing at the Scratch Line, Echoes of a Distant Summer, Homegoing, and Who Fears Death just to name a few. Great literature is out there and like everything else, you have to search for it!
Toni Morrison was a treasure and I am thankful to have lived while she was alive and to have been introduced to her novels at a young age. Rest in power and peace!
7
After reading this piece I realized that it has been nearly 6 months since I read a book...much less a novel. My Kindle is stuffed full of books I haven't read (although most of them are the freebies that are pitiful excuses for novels). I can't bring myself to listen to books on tape and call that reading. So I guess I am just going to have to stop spending so much time reading NYT on line or the New Yorker before bed. I will likely be less up-to-date on the goings on, but I'm guessing I'll be a lot less angry.
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@crystal
If you commute any distance, books on tape, CD or downloadable for new cars, is a wonderful way to "brave the drive".
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@crystal, good heavens - you read the news before bed? How do you sleep?
6
@crystal:
try "audible.com".....it works for many of us. And its not cheating !!!
2
Try Knausgaard. I’m back I to reading now after being immersed in his books for a time.
1
Many any reasons suggest why so few read novels-did they ever-and more theories about how to reverse that trajectory. I don't presume to have an answer, but it seems a contradiction of major proportions that, in a time when boisterous demands are heard that people speak and write English as a condition of citizenship, English literature and grammar are have become secondary pursuits.
Many of us were launched into reading widely because it was suggested at home and at school. Basically, I was reminded that I would go nowhere unless I knew how to communicate effectively and well, and that reading was the key. Teachers and professors hinted at what made writing 'good' but whether we agreed or not, our mission was to search for something better. When English Departments at uni and high school are downgraded, or students are not required to complete courses in literature as conditions of graduation where they are exposed to the best (or the worst) writing, that search for quality literature dissipates. I would say 'ditto' for the ancient classics--Homer, Virgil, Euripedes and the poets, which Sgt. Hathaway referred to in one Inspector Lewis program as "the boys in the band".
Our lives push ahead far too quickly without regard to our wish to slow it down, so I have decided to read Middlemarch and reread the Aeneid by Virgil in translation. But, I am also reading 'Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead who, I can tell, also enrolled in and paid attention in English classes.
19
Alas, Mr. Douthat, I also find it difficult to read a novel. I've set myself the task of re-reading the books I've had on my shelves for years. Years ago, that was an enjoyable goal. Nowadays, it's so much harder. Thanks for your trenchant column. It's sobering for a book-lover. And a writer.
6
@Afi
Me too.
Well said Mr Douthat -another example of civilization in decline. It doesnt take much in terms of general awareness to realize that most peoples attention is riveted to their phone- dumbing down at its most subversive.
I remember when i first read Toni Morrison- I loved how intricate and complex it was. I loved having to really engage my brain to extract the essence of the story- and it was awesome
6
The academic factory can't turn out imaginations and originality, so English Departments produce technique and technicians. We get Slice of Life observations, zeitgeist reflections, all brilliant in the details about clothes and stores and restaurants and marital affairs; and all as parochial and self-centered as the people who think their life stories merit your attention whether or not they have lives in the first place.
Reading a first novel by an Assistant Professor (or worse, a permanent Adjunct) trying to land a real gig, is like getting stuck in an elevator with someone who talks too much. Courage has fled the ivory tower. Look for it in Ellroy, Vachss, Gaiman, and the late Ray Bradbury. They weren't after imitators or tenure.
11
@Next Conservatism This is why all of the novels I read are either critically-acclaimed classics that have stood the test of time or newer novels that have won either the National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.
@MJW, I’d suggest adding the Mann Booker Prize to your list, maybe starting with Milkman by Anna Burns.
Spot on, Mr. Douthat. Thank you. My own experience echoes yours. I've actually found consolation and absorbed focus, a refuge from the online world, in reading more and more poetry.
And thank you for closing with a great reference to my favorite saint, Augustine, at the end!
6
Dear Mr. Douthat,
I’m sorry you’ve succumbed a bit to the “age of distraction”. By contrast, I have kept my flip phone, kept my overall screen time down to perhaps twenty minutes a day, and not only read a novel every two weeks or so, but I write a novel every year or two while working a full-time non-literary job.
Distraction is up to each of us, and I, for one, could care less what goes on around me or how many people choose to partake of the boundless paradise and endless feast that is fiction.
And fear not, the distracted will become less so as they age, and they will rediscover or better yet discover for the first time the glories of the novel.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep on reading.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
P.S. to the incomparable Toni Morrison: May the heavens now make room for your booming voice, your looming talent, and your capacious soul. R.I.P.
19
Just read Ross. A couple of good books and you'll forget about the internet. The internet is to get answers to for easy questions. Good books are for the not-so-easy questions. Life is short. Don't waste your time on the internet and the i-phone.
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Why is it libertarians and conservatives believe in personal responsibility for everyone except themselves? If only dragons and murders can tear Ross Douthat off the internet whose fault is that but his? If he can no longer afford novels the hours of interest and intensity he once did, who is to blame but himself? Is he raising his children with the example of reading or are they too glued to the internet? Does he belong to a book club that commits to reading one book a month and discussing it in a group of equally serious minded fiction-lovers? Last month Nickel Boys came out--has he finished it yet? Book-lovers have and they have conversations about it in clubs and on line. Join us by all means.
We all make choices--good and bad ones. It's up to him to contribute to saving the novel he says he cherishes, not merely lament its passing. I'm surprised he didn't glean that nugget about personal responsibility from any of the many wonderful books from the 19th and 20th century writers he praised.
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Fiction has not been taken seriously by Americans for decades.
So while Morrison was a great writer, few Americans cared, and most people under the age of 40 haven't read five great novels during their entire lives.
I long ago stopped reading most American fiction because it is so trivial. Writers like Morrison was more and more the exception to the rule.
For we Americans, literature is a merely form of entertainment that must compete with the internet, Google, texting, streaming, etc.
4
@Jay David
How right you are. I take refuge in reading and re-reading old books. Beautiful sentences, paragraph structure, beginnings middles and ends, ideas, flashes of the lost world, the taste of honey, the play of words that makes the horrible ridiculous and the shadow of the broken cup, characters realer and more important than the people you know
Each year the Man Booker Institute in the UK awards a prize for best literature in translation and another for best work written in English. About 13 novels are long listed for each prize. Few of these novels have dragons though some involve murders. I can assure you that in reading these works every year I have come across many gripping experiences that may even be more significant theen watching the Ant-Man. In the end one cannot blame hard working writters for some non-existant "death of the novel" any more than you can blame the largly ignored Jazz greats Wayne Shorter or the composer John Luther Adams for the fact that you don't listen to contemporary art music. If you decide to watch films taken from comic books or only listen to pop music from the year you graduated high school that is your perogative. But please don't assume that there isn't another course to follow. If you wish I can send you a reading list.
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I was about to write a comment but you said pretty much exactly what I was going to say.
This is more about the columnist’s personal feeling about novels than any real trend. It’s a decision he made. I suggest you (the readers of these comments) make a different one. I bet most of you already have.
I read 9 novels so far this year (to the best of my recollection), 8 of which were outstanding (and not all of which were American; the desire to read only novels written by Americans is not something I share with the columnist). I also read several collections of short stories and several great nonfiction books. (With regard to the field of short stories, I very belatedly discovered Deborah Eisenberg this year.)
There is great work being published all the time. Check your phone for a list.
9
Having worked for literary agents and as a writer I'd like to add that the publishing industry is also responsible for the change in reading habits. They're driven more by profit and loss statements and less by literary merit. They were always in it to make a profit, which is fine. But TV, films, and streaming video have narrowed their margins. YA and genre fiction reliably make money so they print it and some of it is very good.
There're literary works from both indie and big publishers that are excellent, but none of us can say if any of them, in retrospect, will capture the extremities and strangeness of the present day in the US. It's almost impossible to make a living writing these days unless you're one of the lucky few. Otherwise you have to wander deep into a forest, subsist on wild nuts and berries and morning dew until your draft is done or you collapse from malnutrition and/or rabies.
46
@Kate: And publishers won't review manuscripts that are longer than 120,000 words unless the author's last name is Rowling or Franzen. This makes it even harder for a reader to find the immersion experience of a George Eliot, Tolstoy, or Dickens novel.
14
@Kate
Here you are talking not of books but "product".
2
Ross, might I recommend the works of Louise Erdrich, Richard Powers, Kazuro Ichiguro, Pat Barker, or many others who continue to reach the heights of Morrison, Fitzgerald and Melville, among many others. The distraction today is not all that different than that of the penny press, yellow press, nickelodeans, radio, tv, etc. etc. The "Age of Distraction" you decry is the same that Puritan divines decried about romantica novels young women were reading in the early 19th century. Same as it ever was.
13
@stuart
An addition to my northern Michigan colleague’s list would be John Irving and Richard Russo. How these great American novelists can be ignored is a mystery. I spoke with a prominent Canadian bookstore owner a few years back who considered Irving America’s greatest novelist then writing. He’s still at it folks. I actually feel there has never been a better time for great writing. More women and minorities are adding to the expansive tapestry of literature then ever.
3
In 2005, at a National Book Award for distinguished contribution to American letters, after being introduced by Toni Morrison, the novelist Norman Mailer, said:
“What then can a great novel offer such a world? It is possible that the novelist, if his or her talent is deep, may even unravel enigmas that major disciplines are not ready to approach. Our field, our ground, our illumination does not derive from disciplines which have hardened over the centuries to advancing one chosen field of inquiry at the expense of others. We are bound to no discipline but the development of our own experience or, if we are fortunate enough to find it, our vision. So a gifted few may even be ready to explore experience far into moral advances that are not available to other professions.”
I’m waiting for the great novel of the Trump era.
9
@Dave Thomas
The great novel about the Trump era.
Didn't George Orwell already write that one?
2
@Dave Thomas
We already have a few: 1984; Alice in Wonderland; and All Quiet on the Western front.
1
There are about 100 full-time faculty jobs for creative writing MFAs at the nation's colleges and universities, and each year this small elect group stamps out several thousand new MFAs. The rarefied "workshop fiction" practiced in English departments, which has no mass appeal by design, has a large enough market niche in the form of MFA graduates to sustain itself without mass market pressures. This is why there is no "literary" fiction to speak of these days; it's become something between an obscure fandom and worse, a field of academic publishing.
10
@Jason Sneering at MFA students while at the same timing holding them all as elitist? Pretty standard line.
2
There are still plenty of great novelists. I am currently reading a new novel by Richard Russo, 'Chances Are'. It is very good. Please remember he won a Pulitzer. He is still alive and I plan to see him when he comes here to our state next week.
If you are looking for a comprehensive list of great reads and need some encouragement, look no further than the book by James Mustich, '1000 Books to Read Before You Die'. It is a terrific book. My reading list has vastly improved.
8
I recently rediscovered fiction this year. I vowed to read a few novels that either weren't assigned or I somehow missed. These included Slaughterhouse Five (amazing) and Of Mice and Men (heartbreaking––how had I never heard of the ending?). For some reason I'm more drawn toward nonfiction. But there is nothing like stepping in another person's shoes through fiction.
26
@David
There is nothing wrong with preferring nonfiction; my mother does, too. Autobiographies, historical accounts and the like all offer us a chance to step into another person’s shoes. What’s great is that you’re reading, period!
14
Thought provoking article Ross. I used to consider myself to being a rather prolific reader of novels (I'm retired). But sometime ago, think it was around the time Border's went bankrupt in 2011 (they had a store a short walk away), I slowed considerably. In my 70's I like books, tried ebooks but they don't work for me. Then I tried Amazon for a while, but I missed browsing the book shelves for that hidden treasure.
Sad to sad the internet has hurt a very precious part of our lives. Reading that next Great Novel.
12
If we find it difficult to concentrate on a great work of fiction (b. 1963, in my case), it is SO much harder for our children. My daughter is smart, thoughtful and empathetic. Yet I have to have philosophical discussions with her to convince her that long reading is essential to gathering life experience.
2
Good column. Last time I had time to seriously sit down and read was 7 years ago when I was home recovering from being hit by a car. Now here I am 7 years later home recovering from surgery partly to do w/ that incident and now I have time to read again!
13
@APS,
Well, please keep us posted as to your good recovery, and perhaps later, you might share with some of the readers here, choices of reading material that you recommend.
1
Part of the elephant in the room here is the rise of identity politics. Toni Morrison was a great novelist, but she insisted also on being known as "black" novelist. The premise of the identity-politics novel is that the experience of say the black woman is not represented in works by dead white European men and therefore we need new works in the canon.
Over and over we hear that middle-class white men simply do not understand the experience of what it's like to be poor and black, and need to be educated about their experience. But if this is true--if historical literature produces alienation for the non straight white male other, it must also be true that the world of Morrison is alienating for these same people. Is it any wonder then that novel reading is declining? Of course, it is possible to reject the premise of the identity-politics novel, but almost no one seems to be doing so.
Greatness in literature, as in all arts, is transcendent. It exists beyond identity, gender, colour, sexuality or handicap. Perhaps by this light there are no great works of literature. But if so, that is beyond tragic. In our multi-cultural future, when we have nearly destroyed the planet, who will tell stories around the fire?
127
@Hazlit
Perhaps it should not be described as identity literature, but literature from a point of view other people can appreciate. So while great art may be transcendent, all art has its origins in identity, gender, etc. While being an old straight white male, I can also say that two of most influential books I have read are Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Each written from, respectively, an African American male and African American female point if view. And both transcendent.
I also cannot think of any other authors I have found influential and transcendent, e.g., Joseph Conrad, a (now) dead, white, male, who were not writing from point of view of a particular identity.
But none of this matters if Mr Douthat is correct and great novels no longer matter. And for reasons that are technological, and not much related to content or identity.
37
@Hazlit
I personally don't care about anyone's identity, which seems like an adolescent concern that most people grow out of. But that's what is rewarded now. Publication, prizes, and teaching positions go to "historically marginalized" writers who are "empowered" to find their voice by finding their identity. The original invisible man, Shakespeare had no identity.
19
@Hazlit, she was a gift to us and to literature--and deserves praise upon her passing, for all she was. Maybe the "mistreatment of white males" story could wait just a little. I'm sure there are other articles that can be viewed that way. Although frankly, today's front page doesn't lend itself well to the perennial complaining.
32
For a lovely read and a more optimistic take on the prospects of books in the 21st century, look no further than Alan Jacob's "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction." For the record, I share Ross' concern with the "loss of depth and memory" that seems to be a terrible side-effect of the internet age, but this seems as good a time as any to plug a good book.
19
We've been debating the death of the novel for close to one hundred years. The novel, shrunken though it may be, has fared rather better than the symphony, a comparable long form that also peaked in the nineteenth century. There are plenty of excellent later examples but the forms themselves have far less cultural relevance. The comparison with Spielberg and The Sopranos only shows how far fiction had already fallen.
12
There have been many important American writers, who died in recent years: Arthur Miller, William Styron, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Leonard Michaels (somewhat lesser known but just as important), David Foster Wallace, Herman Wouk. There have been important black writers in the 20th century: Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin.
The novel will continue to be important, because it tells stories of people's lives, their relationships, their feelings. It can get into people's heads and tell us what they are thinking. It can show that sometimes their words and actions are at odds with their thoughts.
Nevertheless, new technologies are partially capturing audiences that used to read novels. They don't make demands on one's imagination in the same way. A good film director, like Alfred Hitchcock, can induce one to make inferences that are unstated, but never as much as a good writer.
7
@Diogenes,
Thank you for your contribution and ode to our 'American Novelist', authored by Ross Douthat. Some of us live our life on paper and in novels, where here at this point in time, this reader is surrounded by 'The Heart is A Lonely Hunter', 'The Wind in The Willows', and 'On Main Street', leaving a feeling of being trapped in the above classics, while wishing to move forth in exploration.
It happens, but usually when a fine novel is made into a movie, often more acceptable and palatable to an audience in the times we are living, the latter is not as complete, or open to subjective interpretation. Having watched recently Hitchcock's 'Strangers on a Train', it was quite brilliant, and yet the written page was missing.
When a younger friend told me that the reading of 'Pride and Prejudice' was on her mandatory list, I knew this was going to be a difficult task, and the words of an American professor, John Williams, came to mind that reading novels should be enjoyable.
With this in mind, about to attempt Gissing's 'Grub Street', and remove my attention for awhile from the News online, where life sounds stranger than fiction.
3
She was the BEST living American Novelist. But She will live on, Her Words will be treasured as long as Humans can survive on our Planet. My deepest sympathies and greatest respect to all her Family and friends. Read Her Works, they will change your outlook and your heart.
63
@Phyliss Dalmatian
Cormac McCarthy was and remains our best living novelist.
2
It's hard to fathom the printed word (bound into a book) being on a slow trajectory to oblivion, but then again, we are doing away with cursive in most schools.
We are also living in the age of the emoji, but I digress.
I am not sure we will have the ''great'' American, or any other nationalistic voice appear, because we do now live in an age of splintering of our time in a myriad of ways. We are bombarded with images and ideas, and have trouble focusing for a slow, immersive and pensive read.
Then again, voices that have been shut out for essentially the span of time are now finding themselves. They have a platform to bring their own identities to the written word. (or elsewhere) It is exciting times - especially so to be Liberal. (present blip in time aside)
Take the time to slow down and read someone else's point of view and images they present. (especially if you are a conservative)
Then you might not try to label every other column,
37
@FunkyIrishman
Thank you.
Emojis are cave painting symbols. they work without language. Ironic that in our techno-strung time we default
to them so often. It spares us explaining complex feelings and gets us past the moment of contact without having to account for ourselves. Like children.
Morrison knew the power and subtlety of language and immersed us in places and times and individuals we would have known no other way.
16
Dickens, Tolstoy, Mann and Hemingway are certainly worth tuning out television and social media. But, it requires determination after work or weekends. Honestly, I often lack the effort.
5
@alanmaaa My project is this: while I still have my brain, I am challenging myself to read the classics. Start by sitting with a chosen book and read. Have a bookmark handy and reward yourself a few pages a day- until you cannot put it down.
Moby Dick. The Brothers Karamazov. Les Miserables. I am struggling to turn the pages of James Joyce's "Ulysses" ( after reading "Portrait of the Artist").It takes time, but it's rewarding.
Try Chekhov's short stories.
I get my fill of the deplorable news easily these days. It leaves me angry and spiritually unnourished.
3